


Dig Your Own Grave and Then Bury the Hatchet

by dearqueer (plushrump)



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Denial, Highschool AU (sort of), Lots of OC sorry, M/M, Minor Character Death, Revolutionaries In Love, Slow Burn, Soul Bond, The Resisty, Underage Drinking, Zim Lies A Lot, boyfriends in space, maybe? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-05-09 20:52:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5554913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plushrump/pseuds/dearqueer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternatively Titled: In Which Zim and Dib Makeout and it Upsets the Balance of the Entire Universe</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well. heres this. vasquez can eat my entire asshole. 
> 
> special super amazing thanks to my beta/alpha/shoulder to cry on/person who dragged me through this fic/wife glutenfreeskateboard @tumblr.com who w/o i would have died probably

As it sometimes happens at the Membrane household, the morning starts more with a bang than with any of the normal acquiescence of night passing into morning. That is to say- the kitchen has exploded for the third time this week.

It had started, technically, when Professor Membrane had left his robot counterpart in charge of breakfast. Dib had argued that with how often these explosions were happening, the “Dad-bot” was too buggy to be left as the proverbial “man of the house”. Apparently, Dib realizes as he stares at the kitchen, his Dad either disagrees or doesn’t care. Dib is bitterly more inclined to think the latter.

While, thankfully, most of the kitchen remains intact, the microwave seems to be a lost cause. It looks like a sad pile of machinery on top of a throne of linoleum. A thin layer of melting fire retardant foam covers the back end of the kitchen. The “Dad-bot” remains at the disaster zone, taking turns between beeping frantically and playing half-aborted pre-recorded greeting messages at him. The kitchen table, for its part, remains mostly untouched. Dib thanks his lucky stars for small mercies.

Unfazed by the fairly normal occurrence of being woken up by microwave explosions, the Membrane siblings are sitting at their not-singed kitchen table in an almost amicable breakfast. Gaz had grabbed a normal, nonexplosive bowl of cereal. Dib elects to eat the dry cereal with his hands straight from the box. Gaz looks at him with unconcealed disgust.

“So, anyways” Dib continues, popping a candied marshmallow into his mouth rebelliously “I’m thinking of uploading a new video sometime this week. I’ve got these new pictures of Zim without his disguise on where you can almost see his antennae without editing it. I’m so close to revealing him, Gaz, I can taste it.”

Gaz is working on pushing a very specific flake under the milk with her spoon with intense concentration. She makes a noncommittal grunt.

“Speaking of Zim- haven’t you noticed he’s been very green lately? I wonder what he’s been planning. Probably something to do with those weasels he’s been gloating about.” Dib crunches another oversweet hard marshmallow between his teeth thoughtfully. “I’ll have to stop by his house again this morning before school.”

He had already stopped by Zim’s house the night before, but it was better safe than sorry. Zim is not unknown to make empty threats, but he has been inactive for quite some time. It’s getting to be past due for a world-destroying doomsday occurrence, even accounting for Zim’s slowed pace over the years. When they were kids Dib would expect an interplanetary war at least once a week, but slowly it crawled to every couple weeks to every month to every season.While Dib and the alien menace had reached more of an impasse in the recent years, he still wouldn’t describe them anywhere within the realm of “getting along”. He still hates Zim’s guts, even if he’s not quite so passionate about seeing said guts splayed out on an examination table. Honestly, he wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with seeing anyone on an examination table these days- his zeal for blood and violence had calmed significantly as he got older, developing instead a more peaceful approach to his investigations.

Gaz gives him a half-lidded squinty look before rolling her eyes and looking back down at her bowl. “You’re so embarrassing when you’re like this.” Gaz says to her cereal.

Dibs face heats up, caught not paying attention.

“Like what?” Dib asks.

Gaz chews slowly. In the back of the kitchen Dad-bot reminds them to not forget their lunch in a tinny electrical voice.

“Not that I care, but whenever you talk about Zim you get a certain way. An annoying way.” She says.

Dibs ears turn red and he shoves his hand back into the cereal box. Gaz makes a face. Dad-bot reminds them to not leave their dishes in the sink.

Dib absolutely does _not_ get a certain way. He will admit that throughout the years Zim had become sort of a constant for him- he’d be lying if he said that it wasn’t mainly due to Zim that he’s still here and working- he didn’t treat Zim any differently than he would any case file. Regardless of any nostalgic feelings Zim is still an evil alien hellbent on destruction.

“I do not get some type of way. I’m being rational. He’s an alien. An alien invader sent to destroy our _entire planet_.” Dib says.

Gaz lets out a long suffering sigh and lets her spoon fall noisily into her bowl. She crosses her arms and fixes him with a look.

“And how many times has that actually happened, huh, Dib? How many times over the last five years has Zim actually managed to do anything? He’s stupid, and you’re stupid for caring so much.” And then she adds, as if it’s an afterthought “And your haircuts stupid, too.”

Dib unconsciously raises a hand to his hair. “What’s wrong with my hair…?”

Gaz picks her spoon back up from her bowl and says “Listen. I’m only saying this because I’m tired of hearing your nasally voice complaining every day. It was funny at first but now it’s just annoying me. Zim has never been a threat-”

“Because I’ve always stopped him!” Dib says. 

“-and your obsession is creepy and weird. Everyone thinks you have a thing for him” Gaz finishes.

Dib makes a weird strangled noise in the back of his throat.

The remark had hit a little too close to home in the realm of his personal life.

The first time that- _the incident_ had happened, he felt kinda bad about it. A little bit for Zim because he feels absurdly guilty for getting off on someone who he had, up until recently, pictured as sort of sexless. Mostly though, he felt bad for himself that he had to endure a wet dream about his self-proclaimed arch nemesis.

And on top of it all he couldn’t even look at Zim in the eye the next three days, leading to him almost losing his fingers in shop class when they got paired together.

He had initially wrote it off as a one-time thing, but then it happened again the next night, and the next. It was like there was a little Zim in his head that was trying to ruin his entire life. The harder he tried to push the fantasies out of his head, the more annoyed the Zim in his head got, and the worse his fantasies got. Like it was trying to punish him. Maybe he really _was_ crazy.

What does Gaz know? It’s perfectly normal for sex dreams to be about people you’re not even sexually attracted to. It’s all very normal and healthy, and in fact, it makes perfect sense because he sees Zim more than he sees anyone else.

Dib is broken out of his reverie by Dad-bot getting stuck behind a cabinet and letting out a line of distressed beeps.

Dib wipes his hands on his pants and fiddles with closing the tab on the cereal box.

“I have more things besides Zim happening in my life.” He says.

Gaz snorts doubtfully, getting up to put her dishes in the sink. Dad-bot flies over to remind her again, unhelpfully, not to leave her dishes in the sink. She bats it away with one hand.

“I don’t care what you have going in your life, Dib” Gaz says, “But some of us around here are trying to live their own lives without you sticking your gross problems all in it.”

She sidesteps Dad-bot. “Don’t let me catch you later. If I see you at school I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“I go there too, y’know!” Dib protests to her back. When all he gets in response is silence, he reaches out and knocks the cereal box onto the floor resentfully. It sits sadly in a pile of foam.

“I love you, son.” Dad-bot says helpfully.

Dib covers his face with his hands and groans.

 

Dib spends the whole rest of the day trying desperately to find a new lead. Maybe his sister had a point, the Zim case was getting kind of stale. His last three vlog posts had all been about Zim, and Dib should probably have a better-rounded portfolio if he ever wanted to be taken seriously by the Swollen Eyeballs. His school was practically a hotbed of paranormal activity, he could find a new case easy. In fact, he could probably have five new leads by the end of the day without even trying.

Dib spends at least three minutes too long rearranging the tech in his locker. He picks up his video camera off the top shelf and puts it back on the bottom shelf. Usually at this point in the day he’s at Zims locker, trying to goad him into spilling his alien secrets. Dib picks the video camera off the bottom shelf and puts it back on the top shelf. He’s starting to become a little all too aware of how much his daily schedule revolves around Zim and it’s only the first period shift.

He thought there might be a Sasquatch in his second period chemistry class. But it turned out that the kid who sits next to him is just really hairy and even grumpier. He didn’t take too well to being asked if he was sure he didn’t live in the woods, and Dib ended stuck in his locker all the way until fourth period.

Panicked about the time lost, he spends all of lunch period resolutely camped out in the last stall of an A-hall bathroom waiting for the ghost that he knows haunts that toilet to make an appearance. It’s not until an hour later, stomach growling and no ghost that Dib starts to really panic.

He’s skipped all but two of his classes today, and he has nothing to show for it. And as much as he can accuse his Dad of being a physically absent father, he’s still definitely going to give Dib hell about not showing up to class- especially with the excuse of waiting for bathroom ghosts.

He packs up all his equipment in time to make it to his seventh period. He spends twenty minutes wondering if he could make the argument for his professor being a vampire before he’s kinda disgusted with himself.

He’s grasping at straws but he has an old dusty file in the back of his locker that reads “star quarterback- vampire-chicken”. It’s at least two years old, but Dib thinks he remembers from his very small reservoir of sports knowledge that the quarterback remains the same right? Or maybe that’s hockey. Does hockey have a quarterback?

Whatever, the point is that Dib knows there’s a game tonight which will give him a couple extra hours at least to find a new case. He also knows that the likelihood of Zim showing up to any school activity is at least under two percent. Dib’s starting to feel like his desperate plan may be a winner after all.

 

Dib realizes pretty early on that he knows absolutely nothing about football. What’s worse, he seems completely incapable of learning anything about football. Dib tries his hardest to keep his video recorder on the quarterback, but keeps losing him and following the wrong person. He sighs audibly and checks his camera to delete the footage of the past couple minutes. Dib feels something hit the back of his head, and he waves it off. Adjusting the lens, Dib hopes that maybe if he zooms in far enough, it’ll be virtually impossible to lose the quarterback. Why did they all have to wear the same uniform?

Another small prick of pain, now just below his ear. This time it’s accompanied by an unfortunately familiar cackle. He whips around, and opens his mouth to say something and sees Zims smug expression. It takes all of his willpower to forcibly shut his mouth closed and turn back around, every muscle in his body tensed with anger. He didn’t come here to entertain Zim, he came here to follow up on a case because he’s a paranormal investigator and not Zim’s- boyfriend or whatever. He feels his ears turn red and smashes the camera back to his face. Dib wonders out loud if the lights had any effect on the quarterback’s vampirism. This time he gets a warning giggle before he feels a hard smack right between his shoulder blades. He hears whatever it is scatter across the ground and sneaks a quick glance at it. Peanuts? Dib is nearly sure that they don’t even sell peanuts here.

Dib tenses up with anger but resolutely keeps his camera pinned to the quarterback. He’s holding the camera hard enough to break it. The quarterback is sprinting along the edge of the field. The ball gets tossed over him and with a whistle blow he slows to a walk. Dib wonders if his walk is kind of chicken-ish? The guys legs are pretty long.

Dib feels a sharp pain at the base of his neck and he drops his camera on the group in surprise as he moves to rub at the sore spot. Jesus Christ. Dib snaps around. 

“What the fuck is your problem, Zim?” He snaps.

Dib is immediately struck by how absolutely ridiculous Zim looks, as per usual. He’s wearing a sporting jersey backwards over his usual uniform, and he’s got a life size flag of Brazil tied around his narrow shoulders like a cape. Dib would find himself amused at Zim’s pathetic attempt at understanding anything if he wasn’t so annoyed.

Zim’s face is unreadable for half a second, and then the usual haughty look settles over his features. He stands up, full on knocking over his bag of peanuts into the bleachers.

“I see you’ve noticed that I’m here.” Zim announces, hands on hips.

“You’ve literally been throwing peanuts at me for the entire game.” Dib snaps.

“ _Silence_.” Zim hisses “Anyways, where was I? Yes, I see you’ve noticed that I’m here. Your worst enemy has infiltrated the most sacred of human school activities.”

Zim takes a step down to the bleacher seat below him and steps right into a kid’s popcorn. Ignoring the kids shout of protest, he uses the kid’s next to him head to balance himself and steps down completely.

The overhead sports light illuminates Zim from behind and makes him look shadowy and the shitty band charge song sounds like some sort of stupid theme song. Dib’s sure that Zim doesn’t miss that and he almost rolls his eyes at the thought.

“You’re not my worst enemy Zim.” Dib lies. “I have other things going on in my life besides you.”

Zim takes another step down, almost tripping over himself and the bag of popcorn. Dib suppresses a laugh. He’s trying to show that he doesn’t care, and something tells him laughing at Zim falling down the bleachers like an idiot isn’t in that job description. Zim scrambles his way to the bleacher seat just behind Dib.

After a beat Zim draws himself up and snorts derisively.

“Liar, liar. Plants for hire.” He sneers.

“It’s pants on-” Dib makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat and turns back around. Why was he even doing this in the first place? This is stupid. “Wait, you know what? I just remembered I don’t care.”

Zim scoffs and Dib feels a split second moment of triumph before he’s being shoved down the bleachers and honestly what the _fuck._

Dib is recovering from the shock of being fucking pushed when he hears Zim prattling on about conquering and stupid planet and before Dib can have a minute to really think through his actions he’s flying to and his fist is connecting heavily with Zim’s jaw.

Zim cradles his jaw with one hand for a moment, shocked. Dib hisses through his teeth and shakes out his hand because damn that kinda hurt. Zim smirks and shoves at Dibs midsection with both hands and Dib is falling backwards. Dib grabs onto Zim’s cape to stabilize himself, and he almost feels Zim keeping him in place and then he’s falling back anyway and bringing Zim with him.

Dib falls hard on top of Zim onto the bannister below, upsetting someone’s drink. They struggle for a moment, and Dib makes to bite at Zim’s shoulder but Zim grabs Dib’s hair in his hand and yanks back hard. Dib grunts in pain and he feels his glasses fly off his face. He spares it a second of concern because he literally just broke a pair last week but then Zim’s other hand is trying to grab at his neck.

Dib reaches and grabs at the only thing he can reach, which happens to be Zim’s tunic. He pulls Zim up flush again him and then braces his knees on the bannister and slams Zims head back down onto the metal seat. Zim cries out in pain and Dib laughs until the heel of Zim’s palm is suddenly being slammed into his mouth. Dibs mouth fills with a sudden warm, coppery liquid.

Dib rolls himself to the side and pins his elbow hard into Zims shoulder.

“ _Enough._ ” Dib says, voice ragged.

He’s taken completely by surprise when Zim freezes underneath him.

Dib draws back, slowly, letting up on the elbow pinning Zim to the ground and shifting his weight to his other hand.

Zim’s eyes are wide and livid, almost as if he can’t believe himself. His mouth is dropped open and he’s panting short angry snarls of breath. His wig is askew, and he’s mostly wrapped up in that stupid flag and overlarge jersey. Zim’s chest is heaving and his body feels warm and solid beneath him. Dib wonders hysterically why he hasn’t noticed how wiry Zim is for how tiny he is. Or how warm he is. Or how good he feels trapped underneath him.

Wait- no. That’s definitely a thought that needs to be shoved back down deep.

Dib feels his face heat up and he unwillingly looks up to meet Zim’s eyes. Zim’s eyes are still angry, but he looks more confused. It feels like Zim’s eyes are pinning him there, and he’s completely unable to look away.  Dib feels a sharp pain in his chest and he lets out a shaky breath he didn’t know he was holding in.

“Do you mind moving out of our seats?”

Dib feels like he’s been slapped and his eyes snap up to the beefy kid whose soda they must have knocked over earlier.

Dib looks back down at Zim, and then he runs.

 

Dib doesn’t run very far, holing himself up in the handicap stall of the bathroom and trying to clog up his bloody nose with toilet paper. It’s not until he reaches underneath the console to find out he’s used the last of the toilet paper that he collapses against the sink. It’s apparent that Dib’s gotta start getting real serious about finding some new cases. Gaz is right- his involvement with Zim has gone too far and he needs to put a stop on it before things get weird. Well, weirder.

Dib groans and shifts to look at himself in the mirror. He looks bad. The underside of his eyes look hollowed out and grey. A hairline crack runs up the left lens of his glasses which, great, his Dad’s gonna be pissed about. His nose has a gross, scablike wad of blood soaked paper towels suctioned under one nostril. Dib runs a thumb over the split on his lip just below it and it stings like a motherfucker. He cranes his neck to the side to see if Zim got him on the neck and almost misses the little mark right at his collarbone.

It hurts Dib’s ribs to lean in, but he gets as close to the mirror as he can manage and sees the tiniest black triangular mark right above his collarbone. He runs a thumb against it and finds it almost raised, like a tattoo. Did Zim plant something on him? He doesn’t remember Zim touching his collarbone at all. It doesn’t really hurt either.

Dib’s considering if he should try cutting it out-just to be safe- when the bathroom door slams and he almost hits his face on the sink trying to duck. Which is stupid and doesn’t make any sense because he’s in the bathroom stall.

He hears one voice laugh. “Yeah, man. We’re all heading over to Mike’s after the games out. You should head on by, man, I heard the quarterback’s gonna be there.”

Dib holds his breath. The quarterback? This could be his golden opportunity, dropped right into his lap. He didn’t get that good of a chance to observe the quarterback during the game because of- circumstances. Circumstances he could forget about if he can get himself into this party. Dib keeps himself quiet and listens to the rest of the exchange where luckily, the idiot gives away the address to the place. Fishing a pen out from his coat pocket, Dib jots the address down on the back of his hand.  

Dib takes a deep, stabilizing breath. It’s just a party. It’s a stakeout really. He can do this.

Dib can absolutely do this.

 

Dib can absolutely not do this.

This thought occurs to him roughly somewhere in between his third and fourth shot of tequila. He’s been informed by some nice girl with unfortunate hair that he’s going to vomit in the morning, but it’s hard to care after three shots of tequila.

What surprises him the most is how he hasn’t been caught yet. While he’s not exactly bullied at school, he isn’t well-liked either. His family and his personality had gained him minor notoriety at least throughout his grade. But for the most part he’s been pretty left alone.

The thought that this might have to do with him hiding behind the couch has occurred to him. He had dragged a chair from the dining room set back there earlier and decided to camp there for the evening. This ended up being a disastrous mistake, as the drunker he got, the harder it was to waddle out from behind the couch without falling flat on his face. As it was, he kept parked in his chair and contented himself with stealing drinks that people were unlucky enough to sit down on the couch in front of him.

While the drinks he had been snagging had made his head feel warm and fuzzy, the feeling didn’t really extend to his mood. The quarterback that he had been waiting for all night hadn’t even decided to make an appearance at the party. From what he’s picked up from couch gossip, the guy is out with his girlfriend. Figures.  
  
Dib sighs and- someone must have moved the couch a couple inches because Dib leans forward to rest his head against the back of the couch and almost pitches forward off of his chair, catching empty air. Dib reaches out a hand to stabilize himself and squeezes his eyes shut against the wave of nausea and dizziness that overcomes him. He focuses on the thought that he is not going to vomit all over the carpet.

God, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Zim. Dib feels a thrill up his spine that cuts through the nausea at the memory of the game. It seemed like even when he was trying to avoid Zim his life revolved around him. Zim still had the power to push his buttons and drive him absolutely fucking mad. And his face when he had been trapped underneath Dib. _No, okay, bad thoughts._ Dib felt a roiling in his stomach that had nothing to do with the booze.   

So he makes himself a home behind the couch and decides that he’s not leaving this spot until he well and truly forgets about Zim. From the safety and anonymity from behind the couch, of course, but still.

“So anyways” Dib tells the back of Torque’s head, absolutely not slurring his words “That’s when I knew he wasn’t just any vampire, but a hybrid vampire. I mean- C’mon. C’mon. _C’mon._ It’s right there in front of your eyes. He has chicken feathers in the folds of his neck fat! His name is vampire-kid! He says he has deep-rooted ana-” Dib screws up his mouth “fuck- blood problems, but what kind of blood-problem persons skin burns off when they touch the sunlight, huh? _Huh?_ ”

When the head doesn’t give him a response, he learns forward a little and pokes at it. It starts and Torque turns around and looks at Dib like he’s just now noticing he exists. He squints at Dib.

“Hey, man. Were you even invited to this party?”

Dib brings a hand to his chest in an overdramatic display of mock offense.

“I’m trying to save all of your lives.” Dib says gravely.

Torque snorts and turns back around and brushes Dib of with a: “Whatever, man.”

Dib gives him the best glare he can manage while he can’t feel his face, but lets the conversation die. He tilts back his stolen plastic cup (and almost himself) and realizes that it’s sadly empty. He could wait for someone else to come around and forgot their drink on the armrest, but the party’s migrated and less and less people are stopping by his couch. Dib tries to get himself together.

“Well, Torque,” Dib hauls himself up out of his chair. He tries to put a hand on his shoulder and misses, putting a hand on the side of his meaty face. “It’s been real.”

Torque grunts and Dib tries his hardest to get out from behind the couch without getting his feet tangled in his chair’s legs or on the corner of the couch. He almost falls flat on his face when he realizes that the space he squeezed through to get back here has apparently not only moved itself to a completely different location, but has also become a lot smaller then he remembers it being.

After two minutes of wandering and trying to remember where the alcohol was kept, he manages to find the kitchen again. Which is, for some reason, way fucking brighter than the rest of the house. Squinting against the harsh fluorescents, Dib seizes a glass tumbler he sees on the table and hopes it’s somewhat clean. He picks a bottle of something that seems the most full, and he’s in the process of getting the rubix cube of a cap off when he hears something disgustingly familiar. Goosebumps breakout across his shoulders.  

Dib snaps around way too fast, nearly falling completely on the table and the floor at the same time. He almost vomits all over himself, mostly because the room is spinning at top speed but also because of what he sees, at the other side of the kitchen. Zim is leaning against the wall, chatting with some girl like he god damn belongs here and like Dib didn’t just try to bash his head into the bleachers a couple hours ago. Zim’s leaning against the wall with his shoulder, holding a bright red cup with the ends of his claws and swirling it around. Dib feels hot bile rise in his throat, and his head feels light from more than just the alcohol. How did Zim even get here? Was he invited? Was Zim, alien menace and threat to human life as we know it, invited to a party of his peers and not Dib, you know, _the actual human?_ Zim. The green one with no ears.

He’s the last person Dib wants to deal with right now. He’s just gonna take this bottle of something and go to his couch.

His feet seem apparently disconnected from his brain entirely because he finds himself walking across the kitchen. He marches up to Zim as indignant as one can be completely sloshed and inserts himself aggressively in front of his classmate. Zim continues to not notice him and swirl around his cup and Dib yanks Zim’s cup out of his hand and impulsively gulps the rest of it. He’s filled with immediate regret as it feels like it’s taking an entire layer of skin off his throat down with it. Dib’s eyes burn but he tries to blink through it, refusing to let his eyes water.

Zim gapes, looking outraged and offended. Then his eyes register Dib’s swaying and he smirks.

“What do you think you’re doing, you worm?” Zim asks lightly.

Dib scoffs. “What am I doing? I-What do you think that you’re doing?” Dib feels a rush of pleasure at this, the back and forth game that they play.   

“I” Zim delicately picks his empty plastic cup out of Dibs hands “am simply bonding with my fellow human stench-children at this ceremonial-” Zim moves his free hand in little circles as he thinks for a word, “shindig.”

Dib sneers and considers taking the cup again out of spite, but restrains himself. The weight of the alcohol hits him suddenly, and he slumps harder against the wall. Zim grins.

“It’s interesting to see that my amazing skills in hand to hand combat have affected you so badly.” Zim says, pretending to buff nonexistent nails on his tunic which is, Dib thinks, really stupid.

“Whatever, Zim. It’s called drinking. You know alcohol? Something that normal human kids do?” He ignores the traitorous little thought that tells him that this is really the first time Dib has gone out and drank.

“Shut up.” Zim hisses “I love to drink your disgusting recreational mouthwash poisons.” He raises the red cup a little to emphasize his point.

“Sure, okay.” Dib says doubtfully. He wonders, fleetingly, if they have alcohol on other planets and considers asking Zim for half a second before it strikes him that it almost sounds like they’re having an amicable conversation. He scowls.

“You know you have to be invited to these things, right Zim?” Dib says. He resolutely ignores the hypocrisy of his own argument and glares at Zim’s stupid red cup for swimming in his vision.

Zim cocks his head to the side and gives Dib a toothy grin “Of course. I’ll have you know I received my invitation via the booked face. What about you, Dib-worm?”

Dib feels his stomach drop.

“No you weren’t.” Dib says.

 He realizes a second to late that he didn’t answer Zim’s question.

Zims face is blank for a moment and then his smirk takes up his entire face. Dib can count every single one of his pointed teeth.

“Ohoho, Dib. Are you telling me that I, your sworn enemy and future slave-driver, was invited to a party of your peers, but you weren’t? How pathetic. Must sting to see me win.” Zim curls his lips in a sneer and Dib wonders, stupidly, why he hadn’t noticed before that Zim even had lips. Which is ridiculous of course he has lips how else would he talk, and _anyways_ that’s enough thoughts about Zim’s lips.

Zim was leaning in so close to his face, Dib was aware that they were probably attracting stares. It occurred to Dib, randomly, that they probably looked like lovers, pressed up against each other so close that Dib could feel Zim’s warm breath across his face. Zims voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

“Are you gonna run away again, Chicken Dib?”

Dib remembers only a few bits and pieces of what happens next. He remembers seeing red, and that heavy-light feeling in his chest he’s come to associate with Zim. He remembers his grip on Zim’s upper arm, and the way the delicate bone felt under his fingers and wondering if it would leave a bruise. He remembers getting in a room-somewhere, and the slam of Zim’s body hitting the back of the door as it shut behind them. He plants both his hands on either side of Zim’s head and leans in as close as he dares. It feels like the floor is spinning up from underneath him, and he’s glad for the stability of the cold wood.

“Does this look chicken to you? Huh?” Dib asks, low and menacing.

Zim gives him a disgusted look.

“You’re drunk, human. Let me go.”

Dib roughly pulls at the collar of his shirt and points to the mark on his neck as best he can with the same hand.

“What is this, Zim? I know it’s from you. It’s been here for months now and it won’t go away and it looks like that stupid insignia on all your- on your ship. I know you know what it is, Zim. Tell me what you did to me.”

Zim gives him a look.

“You’re crazy, human. Let me go.”

Something inside Dib snaps at the insult and he’s reminded, inappropriately of his late night dreams. Suddenly Zim is far too close and too far all at once. His voice is more hushed.

“What is it, Zim?” He says slowly and deliberately.

Zim rolls his eyes, but gives a cursory glance to the mark anyways. He seems to do a double take and leans in further, squinting and almost touching Dib’s collarbone. Zim lifts a claw up to trace lightly over the mark and Dib suppresses a shiver. He looks up at Dib, visibly pale.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He insists, but his voice sounds shaky and unsure.

Dib’s not _that_ drunk.

“You’re lying.” Dib hisses.

Zim makes a weak attempt to duck under Dibs arms, but Dib grabs Zim by the wrist. He tries to pull his wrist from Dib’s grasp gently, but there’s no real fight in it.

“Shut up, you vile human. You terrible, disgusting-”

Dib closes the short distance between their mouths and suddenly they’re kissing.

He brushes his lips against Zims tentatively at first, surprisingly tender. Zim goes absolutely still beneath him, but Dib presses further and it seems like Zim completely melts underneath him.

Dib lets go of Zim’s wrist to hold his jaw. He rubs the pads of his thumbs over the delicate curvature of his jawline and tilts Zim’s head back to deepen the kiss.

Zims mouth feels-weird. His mouth is slick and warm and wet, but it’s also scaly and foreign feeling. Dib runs his tongue against the ridges on the top of Zim’s mouth and is surprised when the texture feels a lot rougher. Zim’s tongue slides against his, and Dib is struck for a moment how strange it is to feel Zim’s tongue against his. It feels thin and serpentine, and Dib can feel the little raised edges along the length of it. He feels a little hyper-aware, not for the last time tonight, he thinks, of how really _alien_ Zim is.

Zim lets his free hand tangle through Dib’s hair, keeping him in place and Dib shoves that thought out of his mind. Dib pulls away to worry Zim’s bottom lip with his teeth and is rewarded with a sharp intake of breath. Feeling cocky, he bites down harder and gets what sounds like a half-aborted moan. Zim runs his hand through Dibs hair and pulls back, so Dib bothers himself with trailing his lips down Zim’s jaw.

Zim grabs at the opportunity. “What’re you doing?” He demands breathlessly.

Dib delivers a particularly hard suck to a place just Zim’s pulse would be as an answer. He licks a long stripe down Zim’s neck, and has to pull away when he tastes something plasticy. What is that? Is that

“…paste?” Dib asks, rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“How do you think I’ve been touching water all these years?” Zim asks snidely, but he sounds a bit wrecked.

Dib nips at Zim’s neck in response, eliciting a surprised noise.

“Thought you had invented something, I don’t know, less stupid.” Dib says “Don’t know why, though.”

Zim yanks at his hair hard.  

“Your hair is stupid.” Zim offers.  
  
A beat and Dib’s trying to figure out if he’s going to be mad about that or not. Zim apparently recognizes that and tenses up beneath him. For a couple seconds the air is thick with the understanding of their situation. Eventually, Dib huffs out a laugh against Zim’s neck, and the tension shatters. It isn’t funny, but the parallel to what his sister said this morning is absurd and he’s kissing Zim and his life is absurd. He presses a last, chaste kiss against the spot and leans back up to capture Zim’s mouth in a heated kiss.  
  
“I think it’s time you’ve stopped talking, now.” Dib murmurs against Zim’s mouth. Zim moves his leg to ram his knee into Dib’s stomach, but Dib catches him and moves to pin Zim against the wall with his weight.

The kiss becomes hot and heavy, and Dib is amazed that someone as sharp and defensive as Zim can be so soft and pliant underneath him. He’s vaguely aware, though, of the crick developing in his neck from bending down to get at Zim, and he draws away for a second, forming an idea.  
  
“Jump.” Dib orders, placing his hands around Zim’s waist.

Zim gives him a dubious look.  
  
Dib rolls his eyes but restrains himself from physically hitting Zim. Barely.  
  
“Jump.” Dib tries again, more reasonably. “On the count of three.”

Zim bristles, but does jump at the three, and Dib uses the momentum to pick Zim up. Zim’s legs instinctively wrap around his waist, and Dib adjusts his grip to steady them.  
  
“You’re going to kill us.” Zim hisses, but Dib ignores him and turns to look around the room and –ah there. Lucky.  
  
He walks a few feet and dumps Zim unceremoniously on the bed.  
  
Before Zim can have time to process that he’s just been thrown, Dib is leaning over him, hands running up his shirt and mouth pressed to the corner of Zims.  
  
“You smell like alcohol.” Zim protests weakly.

Dib hums noncommittally and hikes up Zim’s tunic. Zim’s skin feels different too. It feels rougher, almost. Dib realizes with a start that it’s because Zim has no body hair. The skin itself is smooth, almost silk-like, but the thin coat of fuzz is missing. It feels strange under his fingers. Dib also notes that Zim has no bellybutton, which he should have expected, but it still takes him off guard.

His clumsy hands work on getting Zim’s tunic over his head until Zim rolls his eyes and grabs at the thing himself, rolling out of it in one smooth motion. He sits up to tug at Dib’s jacket as well, mumbling something about fairness and not being upstaged and Dib sheds both his coat and his shirt.

He leans back down over Zim and feels a thrill at the touch of bare skin. The smooth expanse of Zim’s chest feels weird against his own. He can’t even imagine what his feels like against Zim’s. He’s overcome by the strange hysterical urge to ask him about it.

It’s not very long before they’re both a wreck. Dib, in a stroke of genius, slides his thigh in between Zim’s legs and the expression on Zim’s face almost makes him laugh out loud. Zim’s head is thrown back, and he’s garbling some unintelligible words and Dib doesn’t even know if it’s English. Zim drags his claws down Dib’s back heavily and Dib hisses in pain.  

Dib rocks against Zim, and they manage to find a rhythm somehow between the two of them. Dib looks down at Zim and is surprised to find him looking so vulnerable. His eyes are half-lidded, and his mouth is slightly open, chest heaving. It’s far from an attractive look- but knowing that he caused it sends a flare of desire to the base of Dib’s spine.

Dib leans down to bite harshly at Zim’s collarbone and then Zim is unwinding beneath him, claws digging hard into Dibs shoulder blades. Dib is close behind- a few stuttered movements of his hips and feels his pulse in his throat.

Dib doesn’t remember much after that. He remembers some snippets of conversation, and drifting off to an overwarm body next to him. When he wakes up the next morning to loud pounding on the door and a muffled “ _C'mon man my parents are gonna be home in an hour_ ”, he notices the absence.

Zim is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope jhonen finds this and reads it and vomits for ten straight hours  
> super huge thanks to my beta glutenfreeskateboard on tumblr who is like my dance mom standing at the end of the stage recording me and mirroring the moves this fic continues to exist basically entirely because of her

Zim and Dib go three whole days without talking to one another. (Which is, by record, as his sister keeps reminding him “three days longer than ever since you met”, which he didn’t care to know, _thank you_ , Gaz.)

Weekends and afternoons are dedicated to pretending the other doesn’t exist, and this is an entirely new and confusing concept for the both of them. Otherwise, the school is only so big and is therefore an entirely different can of worms. They pass by in the hallway and swallow down well-worn insults in favor of turning red and green, respectively. When they accidentally brush glances in homeroom, they bite back comments about the others intelligence. Classmates start to get a little on-edge when they even stop the disparaging comments about each other’s mothers.

Everything was calmer, and therefore tenser between them than it has ever been.

Sometime into the fourth day Dib almost breaks the silence when Zim raises his hand to ask, again, if they kept files of the Earth’s defenses in any public record. He looks over at Zim, sneer all set in place and ready to let the proverbial shit fly. He immediately makes eye contact with a rather nasty and familiar looking bite mark peeking out of the edge of Zim’s collar.

Dib feels his sneer drop faster than his face can heat up and spends the rest of the class with his head in his arms pretending to sleep.

Unfortunately, even sleep had been avoiding him lately. It seemed like for all he was ignoring the situation in the daylight hours, his brain would throw it back ten times harder when he was unconscious. He couldn’t catch a single nap without his dreams replaying every second of the night in hyperfocus.

It’s during one of those times that the balance of the universe decides that it’s had enough of being tenuously stretched out to its breaking point, and finally snaps back to almost-normalcy.

Cosmically, it has decided this gets to take the form of Dib waking up from a dream of a tiny green body under him to seeing a blurry image of the same tiny green body bent over the collage on his far wall.

“Are you aware of how many photographs of me you have?” Zim asks seriously. “Honestly, I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so deeply and personally horrified.”

Dib blinks. “What.”

Zim turns around from inspecting Dib’s (apparently horrifying) wall. He places one gloved hand on his hip and Dib realizes sort of belatedly that he’s not wearing his disguise. The implications of that hits Dib harder than Zim being in his room at all. Break-ins were a fairly normal occurrence, but Zim always made sure to keep up his disguise when he could.

Zim sighs. “Retrieve your necessities. Zim is being a good and generous master by allowing you time to pack your bags.”

Dib blinks again, somewhat owlishly. “What.”

Zim’s lets his head roll back as he lets out a comically loud noise of frustration. Dib reckons he kind of sounds like a drowned zebra. Immediately he straightens himself out back into his rigid soldier’s stance and crosses both arms over his chest. Despite his flair for dramatics, Dib’s maybe starting to feel like the idiot here. Which is not something he’s used to feeling around Zim.

“Has anything large or heavy fallen on your overly big and smelly head recently?” Zim asks slowly, as if talking to someone who wasn’t a native to the language of this planet.

“Not recently.” Dib answers truthfully.

Zim seems to think that over for a moment.

“Hmm, pity.” He says.

Dib allows himself to be rightfully offended.

“Wait” Dib says, feeling like he’s finally starting to break free of whatever stupor having his room trespassed by the local criminally insane alien has put over him “Did you say pack?”

Looking up towards the ceiling, Zim brings his hands together as if in a praying motion and touches them to his mouth. Dib wonders if he even knows what that means and where he picked it up from.

“Honestly,” Zim says, obviously terribly aggrieved “Zim is a Taller among minions for putting up with your idiocy and stench. I deserve more than this dirt-ball planet. A couple dirt-ball planets, at least. And slaves to feed me snacks off of golden platters while they wave those giant feather fans at me.”

Dib blinks again and finds himself saying “What”, and he feels like that’s completely fair seeing as Zim is making absolutely no sense.

Zim sighs again and honestly Dib is starting to get irritated with all the sighing. Zim was marching into his room at a quarter past ass o’clock and talking in riddles and berating him for not understanding said stupid riddles.  

Taking a couple steps towards him, Zim perches on the edge of the bed, trying his best to look rather regal and important. Dib tenses up and shifts away warily, eyeing him suspiciously. Zim ignores his obvious discomfort with the air of someone who honestly doesn’t give a shit.

Zim speaks like it’s causing him great pain to be civil. Dib supposes it probably is. “You are aware of the mark on your neck you unfairly and cruelly accused me of causing?”

Dib feels his face heat up and his hand immediately flies up to cover the stubborn hickey under his ear that hadn’t quiet managed to fade.

Zim violently rolls his eyes, which is no small accomplishment. “Not that mark, you imbecile.” Zim traces a little triangle in the air with one pointed claw to emphasize his point and Dib flushes harder at the mistake.

“You mean the mark you did leave on me?” Dib hisses “Yes.”

A pause

“Alien scum.” He throws in for good measure.

 _“Be quiet._ ” Zim screams, not quietly. “I did _not._ ”

“Why else would you be mentioning it then, huh, Zim?” Dib shoots back. His logic is bullet-proof.

Zim sort of explodes. “How did your idiot species survive past monocellular organisms? If I was exacting my great and amazing plan to kill you, would I be here monologue-ing?”

“Yes.” Dib answers truthfully.

Zim hooks two gloved digits into his high collar and yanks it down as far as it will go, revealing in the mirror spot, an exact replica of Dib’s triangular mark.

Zim glares as if looks could actually kill, and he was hoping his would.

“You’re the one who did this to me.” Zim bites out.

Dib hates Zim more than anyone’s ever hated anything, and he feels the burning of it like a hot brand to the chest “Sounds like someone’s projecting, Zim. I don’t even know what the hell these are.”

Zim springs up and off the bed and begins to pace across Dib’s small room, wall to wall. With his jaunty soldier’s march, it takes three steps to reach the outer wall and then three steps to get back to the bed. He makes his six step journey in rapid, quick succession, resembling a really high-strung birdie in a pong game.

Zim snarls. “You started the whole thing with your disgusting human emotions. Its reasons like this that the Irken Empire has weeded out such things. I understand it must be difficult to be around great and amazing Zim at all hours of the day and not swoon at his feet, but you have to know this will score you no points when I’m your future slave-master.” He takes a huge breath, and continues, faster than before “We had a good rivalry going and then you had to go and ruin with by catching some-” Zim stops his pacing mid-distance and spits out the next word with every muscle in his body clenched like it physically pains him to just say it _“feelings.”_

He starts his pacing again, half-frenzied. “The registration shouldn’t have even happened, regardless. The tradition is archaic, and the codes that allowed it to even pass through the approval stage shouldn’t even exist. Which is why I, the most amazing and helpful Invader Zim, now have to go all the way to the planet of assignments to tell them about their oversight and get this fixed because it’s messing up my mission assignment and this is _all your fault!”_ Chest heaving, Zim kicks the side of Dibs bed with a soft thwump.

Dib blinks. “Hold on, Zim- are you accusing me of- what did you say- falling in love with you and ruining your whole life?”

“Yes.” Zim says, matter-of-factly, which is hard to achieve when you’re still panting.

Dib looks at him helplessly. “Zim, I don’t even like you!”

The pacing doesn’t start back up, but Zim doesn’t sit back down either. He gestures expansively with his arms and says: “Well somebody had to have caused the registration, and it certainly couldn’t have been me!”

Dib crosses his arms over his chest combatively. “How do you know it couldn’t have been you? You’re the only one who knows what this ‘registration’ is”.

Zim lets out another one of those explosive noises and collapses back on to Dib’s bed dramatically. Dib thinks it’s kind of presumptuous of him to assume he’s entitled to his own bed, since he’s supposed to be sleeping there and all.

Zim sounds resigned, like the pacing and the ranting took all his energy out of him and all he can manage is talking. Dib feels like he’s getting emotional whiplash a bit, but that’s on par for the course when it comes to Zim. “The registration is for something called _Umo’ntebha’_ , which you would know if humans weren’t such a self-centered race that only cared about themselves.”

Dib starts to interrupt to call Zim a hypocrite and maybe some other things.

“Silence, Zim is explaining.” Zim flaps a hand at Dib impatiently.

“ _Umo’ntebha’_ is-” Zim moves his hand in little circle motions as he thinks for a word “the term is nuanced. There is no good translation into your basic and rudimentary gibberish. It comes from _‘Dunmo’’_ , which is to make better, and _‘ntebHa’’_ , which as is ‘together’. It is someone with who betters you, so you register them as your own.” The hand moves up into the air, to punctuate Zim’s frustration “Which is why it cannot be Zim’s fault: Not only am I at the peak of perfection, but my race has moved past such weak afflictions that you call ‘affection’.” He sounds like saying the word “affection” might actually cause him to vomit and Dib’s starting to think that Zim might have some sort of complex about it.

Dib sucks his lower lip into his mouth and chews on it thoughtfully. He squashed down the urge to insult Zim back, because sitting on his bed, physically in front of him was his first sexual experience denying he even had the ability to be attracted to him. Dib had no explanation. Was it the alcohol, then? Despite Zim holding a cup of alcohol, Dib doesn’t remember Zim drinking any of it. He debates with himself for a moment or two about what to say next.

Hesitantly, he asks: “What about the other night?”

He feels more than sees Zim go still on the bed. There’s a pregnant and stressed pause before Zim’s next words. “It was nothing like you think it was.” Zim says eventually, coolly. “A taller commands obedience- especially a bonded taller.”

It feels like getting punched in the throat. Dib thinks his stomach drops into the floor and jumps into his throat all at the same time. His skin prickles with guilt and embarrassment interchangeably. As much as he hates Zim he wouldn’t- he would never-

Dib forces his voice to be even. “Are you saying you- that you didn’t-” He’s having trouble getting the words out “that I forced you?” Saying it out loud makes him feel newly awash with disgust.

The bed is still again for a moment is Dib is horrified Zim is going to say something worse, and is not sure how it can get much worse, but instead Dib is startled by a third loud frustrated noise that he has only ever heard come from Zim.

“No.” Zim says, and, although it sounds like the words are being pulled out of him like teeth, Dib thinks it’s the greatest thing he’s ever heard. Zim screams again. “This bond is making me weak! We must leave immediately.”

The relief that he isn’t some sort of space-age sexual offender is so acute that Dib almost laughs for a moment. Comfortable in this knowledge, he settles for grinning wildly at Zim instead.

Zim hisses at him. “Shut up. I still hate you and your head is too overlarge for your face.”

There’s a beat of silence where Dib is happy and Zim is violently upset before Dib asks “When are we supposed to be leaving?”

Sitting up, Zim smiles at him sweetly.

“Oh, sometime between” Zim glances at his wrist where there’s no watch “Now.”

And then there’s a flurry of motion, and pain explodes across his face. All Dib remembers before blackness is hoping he doesn’t have a concussion.

 

When Dib finally comes to it’s with the worst migraine he’s had in his life, and he’s had Zim replace his brain with a pan of meatloaf once. Pain throbs in tune with his pulse from the base of his skull down into the roots of his teeth. Half of his face feels numb, but the other half is lying on blessedly cool metal floor. He feels his stomach roil at the next beat of pain, and finds himself physically recoiling from the sensation.

Using some hidden stores of willpower, Dib groans through it and tries to open his eyes to assess his surroundings. This turns out to be a horrible mistake as it seems Dib’s current location is the surface of the _fucking sun._

The brightness seers itself into Dib’s retinas and it feels like someone’s pressing a hot iron right on his frontal lobe. He blinks through the pain, and things start to come into focus.

Fortunately, Dib isn’t on the surface of the sun.

Unfortunately, he has absolutely no idea where he is.

The pounding radiating from what’s maybe his brain stem is making everything blurry, but the part of the ceiling he can see is disgustingly familiar. There are thick, serpentine aluminum tubes braided across the top and along the sides of the smooth pink paneling of the walls. It’s not Zim’s base (Dib knows the interior of that like he would know bigfoot from a skunk ape), but it has Irken written all over it.

Sort of literally, actually. Irken text is scrawled on any surface that can be labelled.

Dib chances a look to the side, and sees the cords come to loop and wind around a huge glass window with a small solitary cockpit seat in the middle.  Besides the chair and the long shelf of beeping and blinking controls, nothing else remains but the window.

Dib realizes sort of stupidly that he failed to take notice in his sweeping inspection that outside the giant window is the vast and dark expanse of the galaxies because holy shit he’s in space. He takes this in with the amount of calm that only those kidnapped by homicidal aliens and taken into space can. Which is to say, not well.  

“Did you fucking knock me out?”

The chair swivels around with an audible creak and, miniscule in comparison to the seat sits a disgusting little green bug.

“Calm down, Dib.” Zim says, far too reasonably. He’s making Dib feel like he’s being unreasonable for getting upset at kidnap, battery and probably attempted murder.

“Are we in space? Did you kidnap me and send me to space?” Dib shouts, not calmly, and perhaps going into hysterics. “Trapped with my worst enemy in the vast emptiness of space?”

Zim chuckles good naturedly, “Yeah.” He continues: “You were taking too long. Zim had to speed the process along if we were going to make good time.”

“You’re generosity is boundless.” Dib deadpans, with only a slight edge of panic “Truly.”

“Thank you, Dib-thing.” Zim smiles winningly, unperturbed. He spins the chair around to attend to some rapidly blinking buttons, and Dib takes the opportunity to take stock of the ship.

If the front section seemed bare to him, then the rest of the ship was practically naked. There was the single window, and the single chair, and the single control panel and that’s about it. It was definitely bigger than Tak’s old ship by far, but all Irken machinery looks sort of the same to him.  

And everything was either unpainted or headache-inducing fuchsia.

Something occurs to Dib. Space is really rather large, and in spite of alien technology and all, he figures it’s still pretty massive.  

“Zim, how long is this trip?” Dib asks.

Zim seems to consider it. “Half an Earth-rotation?”

Dib is starting to feel like he might want to die.

“Six months?”

“Sure.” Zim says indulgently.

Dib is starting to suspect Zim doesn’t know how time works.

“Zim! I can’t be gone for a couple months. We have school!” Dib looks down at himself and adds, quieter “I only have one pair of clothes.”

Even as Dib says it he realizes he’s not gonna get Zim to turn around. They’re already on the ship, and Zim might be the most stubborn little thing in the entire galaxy. Dib works on coming to terms with this. The promise of six months exploring where no human has been before definitely helps some.

It’s Zim’s turn to sigh. “You are so needy, human. Your whiny mouth noises are making Zim want to die. Do I have to knock you out again?”

Dib weighs the pros and cons of spending a large portion of the trip unconscious, since it seems there’s no way to convince Zim that he can’t mysteriously disappear from his life for half a year.

“You’re literally ruining my entire life.” Dib says instead, and means it.

“Am I?” Zim asks brightly.

Dib makes a phlegmy noise in the back of his throat but otherwise doesn’t say anything more. He searches his mind for something else to complain about, because he’s absolutely sure Zim fucked up something else.

“Zim, did you, like, pack anything for this trip? Like food or water?” Dib settles on.

Zim makes a face. “I am the mighty Invader Zim, future ruler of your earth and the universe. I know that humans need water, Dib.”

Dib relaxes marginally. At least he wasn’t going to die of dehydration on this trip. He could live with a nice death by implosion, or jumping out of the airlock.

“I have two bottles of it in my backpack.” Zim says smugly.

Dib stills. “Two bottles of water?”

“Yes.”

Dib wonders how quickly he’d be able to strangle Zim to death if he jumped for it right now. He eyes the controls and tries to consider if he could figure them out if Zim was dead. It doesn’t look like it would be that hard.

“How,” Dib begins slowly and carefully, because it is of the upmost importance Zim understands this “is it that every time you open your mouth, I get these shooting pains to the base of my skull.”

Before Zim can interject he adds: “That’s about enough water to last me three days.” Dib clarifies: “The bottles”.

Zim seems to consider that for a moment. “Well, if you die that will solve almost all of my problems.” He looks Dib up and down and Dib is offended despite that he was considering strangling Zim to death just moments earlier.

“Zim!”

Zim rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine. If you’re going to be a huge queen of the dramatics about it, I suppose we can stop at the next solar system to get you some-” Two little claws form airquotes around an invisible word “water”.

“Again, your generosity is boundless.” Dib packs as much dripping sarcasm as he can into one phrase.

Zim either doesn’t pick up or doesn’t care tells him that he is “the welcome”, and Dib thinks this is going to be a long trip.

It’ll be a complete miracle if they don’t kill one another.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > you may have noticed that it changed from 4 planned chapters to 5. this is because my life is a wreck and this fic has a mind entirely of its own. I had planned for hatchet to have four distinct parts, each having a different shift in the plot. However these assholes keep going off script and doing things out of my net and im literally at this point 10,000 words over what i originally planned. for the sake of time my beta forced me to cut a section in half and post the first section now, and the second section sometime next week. 
> 
> > i have no idea if this is going to end up being five sections and im p sure its not with how rapidly this project is growing out of my control but i hate seeing the ? where my chapters should be so lets pretend i have these characters under control and im planning to have five sections
> 
> > there are a couple blink and you miss it references in here. all of them are to star trek. super bonus nerd points if you spot them. 
> 
> >sorry this update took sixteen years! i was writing star wars porn instead. you know how it goes


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> theres a scene in this i turned in for a writing assignment with the names changed so shoutout to whatever ta finds this on turnitin search  
> as always thx to my beta glutenfreeskateboard for making sure im sometimes mostly in the right tense

Dib decides after some deliberation that he might not have it cut out to be a space pilot, despite having argued to the contrary. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to him, because his only credentials remain that he really really wants to be one. He had dicked around with Tak’s ship before, and, honestly, he had expected to be at least kind of naturally good at flying. Back on Earth he had prided himself on his technical skills with computers. Some of his best plans to kill Zim had been centered on hacking into his base or programming some code, but it turns out that there isn’t that many cross-similarities between Irken and Human interface. Any of his knowledge is absolutely useless in the face of Irken technology. Figures.  Frustratingly, the differences of the interface are a huge barrier. It’s very foreign and like relearning how to use a computer. If the computer were upside down and in a different language.

For the hour since Dib had begged Zim to teach him, Zim’s been leaning over his shoulder, pointing around the complicated grid and explaining each separate component with surprising patience. Even in the face of Dib’s fairly constant cock-ups. Besides the never-ending amount of blackmail Zim must be getting from this, Dib has no idea why Zim’s bothering to teach him, since he could easily tell him to shove it or send him out the airlock and there’s not much Dib could do about it. Dib had gotten a bug up his ass about learning to fly the thing, though, irritating Zim with the idea all day. It was half to get under Zim’s skin and half because he really wanted to, but he was taken off guard when Zim, stomping his foot in his usual flair for the overdramatic, had agreed. Rolling his eyes at Dib’s shock, he cited the need for Dib to know how to escape in an emergency. “Not that there’s any chance someone could overpower Irken technology”, he had said, buffing his gloved hand on his shirt.

Dib hadn’t bought that shit for half the money it was worth- there was no reason for Dib to need to escape with his ship unless he was planning on leaving Zim behind. And as tempting an idea as it sounds, Zim probably doesn’t want Dib with the ability to abandon him at the next rest stop planet. It made him wonder if maybe it was a bond thing, less murderous thoughts towards your partner and more ship-learning thoughts. Dib had decided not to mention it. Since his kidnapping, Zim hadn’t talked about the whole magic soul bond thing, and if Zim was resolute on ignoring the whole thing, so was he.

But despite Zim’s weirdly tender treatment and his own ineptitude, Dib decides that his failures are because Zim is a terrible and useless teacher and not because of that weird fluttery feeling he gets in his throat when Zim accidentally brushes a hand across his neck. Anyway, how was he supposed to understand anything when Zim can’t even teach him the language the controls were written in. Checkmate.

Regardless, Dib still hasn’t figured out how to take the damn thing off autopilot. Check.

Zim lets out a put-upon sigh. It was the kind of sigh you hear from someone who’s already said the same thing four times over. “Alright, Dib. If you think you can manage it, put your hand on the flightpad.”

Dib spends a moment looking at the screen uneasily. He decides to ignore the barb because, truthfully, he might not be able to manage it.

“Is that the one that’s shaped like a triangle?” He asks.

Zim makes a broken noise. He pinches the place where the bridge of his nose would be if he had one. Dib thinks it looks ridiculous. Where would he even pick up that habit?

“Yes, Irk help me. It’s the one clearly labelled flight pad.”

“Zim, everything’s labelled in a foreign language!” Dib says, and points to the screen where everything is in a foreign language. They had had this argument three separate times. Zim refuses to see Dib’s complete illiteracy as an issue.

“Well that’s not my fault, is it Dib-thing?” Zim asks. It is not his fault, but Dib doesn’t exactly see how it was his fault either. 

Dib takes a couple steadying breaths. It wouldn’t do him any good to fight with Zim while he was teaching him something. He might send them shooting into a sun or something, and then they’d die and it would probably be painful. He can do this. He can take the higher road. He places his pointer and ring finger on opposite sides of the top two points of the downwards facing triangle.

“Okay, and now I pull down towards the point?” asks Dib.

“I actually can’t believe it, there is some last dying cells up there in that enormously large head of yours.” Zim says.  
“Yes, pull down.”

Anger bubbles up in Dib’s throat. It lightens his head and it causes him to push his fingers down too fast. Before he can even meet them at the point he’s roughly thrown back against his seat. Gravity wraps thick straps around his skull and tightens. It feels like Dib’s eyes are going to pop out of their sockets, his brain is going to squeeze out of his nose. The pressure on his chest is incredible, he thinks his lungs may be ripping open. And then so abruptly he’s almost thrown against the windshield, they stop.

Zim had reached around him and has his hand flat against a different section of the touchpad, chest heaving. He looks back at Dib, harried, and sneers.

“No more touching Zim’s ship, human.” Zim says.

Dib feels like that might be fair.

-

“Whatever happened to your dog?” Dib asks, and takes a bite out of a granola bar that instantly covers him in a fine pile of crumbs. The only thing Zim manages to have on this ship are these hyper-nutritious space-age granola bars. Dib doesn’t mind the taste so much, but the mess is fucking hell. He keeps migrating around the ship so he can space out his granola piles in vain hope that Zim won’t notice. Going by his sleep cycle, they’re well into their second day and Dib’s decided it’s about time to try to ‘shoot the shit’. Make small talk. Not go insane from the pressing quiet of space.

“Eh?” Zim asks.

Dib flicks an errant crumb off his shirt and sends it scattering along the floor of the ship. It hits the edge of Zim’s chair. Goal. “Your robot slave that you cleverly disguised as a green dog.” Dib says, heavy on the sarcasm.

“Ah, yes” Zim says, missing the sarcasm entirely “That was clever wasn’t it?”

Dib rolls his eyes.

“Anyways, he’s guarding my home from possible intruders. I can’t leave my glorious base vulnerable to the hideous beasts that roam your planet.” Zim says.

Something about what Zim just said hits a chord in Dib.

“Your home?” Dib asks before he can really think it through. He regrets saying it the second it comes out of his mouth.

Zim thankfully answers with a noncommittal hum and not the immediate deployment of the airlock, so he doesn’t push it. Dib takes another delicate bite of his snack bar, giving up on his talking idea and trying to sink into the wall with his silence. Instead he marks that it doesn’t matter how he goes about biting the damn granola bar, because he’s going to get showered with the same amount of fucking crumbs no matter what he does.

Scooting back up against the edge of the wall, Dib tries to discretely brush more of the crumbs onto the floor. Maybe Zim won’t notice his disgusting little granola leavings - the ship is kinda trashed to begin with, anyways. He’s grabbing onto the edge of his shirt to dislodge the snack bits without making the most movement when he gets the distinct feeling someone’s trying to bore holes into the side of his face. The hairs on the nape of his neck stand up.

Hyperaware of the crumbs decorating the edges of his mouth, he turns his head slowly and locks eyes with Zim. Dib knows Zim angry. Angry is practically the only emotion Zim has as far as Dib’s concerned. And Zim doesn’t look angry. He seems to be looking right through Dib almost, as if Dib were transparent and there were something just behind him that he was trying to concentrate on. Dib feels pinned to the floor, like one of those hung butterflies his Dad would keep on the walls. Scared to move in case it disrupted whatever reverie Zim had spun himself into and he really would get yelled at about trashing the ship. Tick by tick, Zim’s eyes come back into focus on Dib’s face. There’s a moment of intense breathlessness, and then Zim snorts and turns around in his seat. The tense line of his shoulders screams at Dib against saying anything.

Confused, and covered in his own food, Dib has absolutely no idea what that was about and decides to keep his mouth shut.

-

“What’s this one called?”

Dib is leaning over the control pad, careful to avoid actually touching it with his stomach because last time he brushed it he almost sent them into hyperspace. Despite Zims protestations, he’s got his face pressed practically against the glass, pointing against the window. His breath is creating a little cloud under his nose, and he periodically needs to move away to wipe at it with his sleeve. Zim reminds him that he’s lucky his ship doesn’t have a touchscreen dashboard, and looks at him warily, but otherwise doesn’t complain that this is the millionth time Dib has asked that question in the past half hour. It’s almost-indulgent of him.

The vibrating excitement had started sometime during the third morning when Dib got over the whole battery and kidnapping thing. The second day he had spent upset, bemoaning his loss of ship-driving privileges and Zim yelling at him about the crumbs all over the floor. Both of those were fair admonitions, but because of the whole kidnapping deal Dib reserved the right to whine anyways. This morning, however, he had woken up and seen this mammoth orange thing floating by the ship and he realized he was in space. Like, outer space. On a space ship. Way out past his own galaxy, and looking at star systems and planets NASA probably would never be able to find. There are people down on Earth who don’t believe in alien life and he’s on an alien spaceship looking at a thousand different solar systems with a thousand different planets that all have their own populations and peoples and cultures. He’s farther from home than he’s ever been, and while the thought makes him feel a little lonely, Dib feels his natural sense for adventure perk up in excitement.

That realization comes skipping hand in hand with a completely different one: Zim is an alien. It makes him feel a little idiotic, because, of course he knows that Zim is an alien. That was practically his whole life’s work.

Is, he corrects himself, swallowing. Is his life’s work.

For some reason, though, it didn’t really occur to him that Zim was an alien with a life outside of Dib. Zim has always been Dib’s villain, but Zim had a whole stretch of life before he landed. One where interacting and mingling with aliens was normal. Dib couldn’t get his classmates to believe in alien life when it was green and screaming right in front of them, and Zim probably had friends of entire different species. And Zim probably knows- everything. Well, alright, not everything, but a great deal more than Dib does. He could tell Dib about different planets and intergalactic law and spaceships and a million different things that Dib’s always wanted to know.

Which, he guesses, is exactly what he’s making Zim do right now.

Dib looks down as Zim swirls his hand through a couple different holo-grids projected in front of the window. He pinches and expands two fingers over a section of the grid to enlarge it, and it snaps up into some invisible margins. Where there was a large scale universal map now sits a grainy projection of a small white, gaseous planet. Zim squints at the print underneath it.

“Planet Glunk,” He says. “Conquered by the Irken Empire in twenty-three ‘bee-eye-dee’, it now serves us as a soda can manufacturer.” He flicks his hand upward through the planet and it slowly begins to rotate.

Dib decides to ignore the note of pride in Zim’s voice. They’d had gotten into a snit earlier about his apparent satisfaction with genocide of entire races that lead to a lecture of Irken culture that Dib didn’t care to repeat. It just causes to remind him that Zim is a hard-headed genocidal fascist, and it makes his skin crawl being in the same room with him.

“What’s ‘bee-eye-dee’?” Dib asks instead.

“It’s an acronym, Dib-stupid,” Zim says, twirling his wrist at Dib. “It stands for Before Impending Doom, meaning twenty-three eons before the first hostile takeover.”

Dib looks up and tries to lock eyes with Zim over the hologram. Tries to communicate to him the disgust that makes him feel without saying anything that could get them into another argument. Zim resolutely ignores him, staring into and through the buzzing little planet.

“You mean to tell me you conquered the whole universe so you could use an entire planet to make soda cans?” Dib asks, finally.

Zim snorts. “Nonsense. Not the entire universe.” Dib relaxes a fraction. “Zim still must conquer planet Earth.”

Dib feels a weird catch in his chest at that, and his excitement at looking at planets dampers a bit. He forces his head to turn back towards the window.

“Yeah” Dib says, “Right.”

Trying to ignore the shattering of their little moment, Dib fastens himself to the window again. A tiny, familiar green speck makes itself known in the upper corner of the screen, and Dib knows well enough now to know it’s not a star or an asteroid. Though he can’t read the words that label the planet, Dib thinks he recognizes it.

He smacks a hand against the window to get Zim’s attention. “Hey, isn’t that the planet we’re supposed to stop at?”

Zim purses his lips and does a couple fancy movements with his hands over the pads. The pads make a little blip noise, like a drop of water, and a single line of text is projected up above the maps in red. Once again, Dib bemoans the lack of English translation on the ship. Silently, of course, because he doesn’t want another argument about that either.

Whatever the screens says is apparently not good news. Abruptly, Zim growls and slams his hand down on the pad. The action dismisses all of the screens at once.

“We’re not landing there,” Zim says.

What the fuck.

“Zim, we need water or I’m going to die.” Dib says, pounding on the glass a little with his palm.

Zim swipes broadly along the pad, sending the ship swerving in the opposite direction.

“I don’t care. Zim is the captain and I said we’re not landing there. I owe you no explanation.” There is an edge to his voice that wasn’t there before, and Dib just doesn’t understand.

“God, Zim, why are you always so fucking difficult-”

“Shut up,” Zim interrupts. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Dib doesn’t trust himself to say something else. Doesn’t trust himself not to lean across this stupid dashboard and punch Zim right in his stupid self-righteous face. Source of information or not, he’s still a twat. They sit in the ship in silence for a couple moments, not sure what to do now that their easy truce is broken.

“We’ll stop at the next planet.” Zim says, as if just to say something. Fill the room with his voice and hear himself talk. God, Dib hates him.

Dib doesn’t respond. There are a couple more awkward beats. Good. He wants it to be awkward. He doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of yelling back at him.

Zim clears his throat. Leaning over, he swipes his hand up along the dashboard to bring back up all the maps. He searches for a moment, and then flicks up a small yellow planet. “Planet Taoola is only an Earth hour from here, human. And they have a much better arrangement of snack-age.”

It seems like the closest to an apology Zim can get near. Dib tries to force the anger out of his shoulders, and takes a deep breath.

“Tell me about it?” He asks.

Zim does.

-

Dib thinks Taoola is okay. He’s not sure about the “arrangement of snack-age” because he doesn’t have much to compare it to, but he supposes it’s okay. Some sort of calming elevator music is playing over the store-com, which is nice. It makes Dib almost feel better about being abandoned by Zim in the snack aisle and left with naught but some sort of space credit card to defend himself. Zim has left him in this confusing, ‘okay’ gas station and all he has to defend himself if someone decides to take him with them is a little square piece of plastic. 

In his quest to find water, Dib finds the beverage aisle hosts an insane variety of different drinks. He is convinced that every label is in a completely different language. Did they not have some universal language for interstellar communication? Some sort of galactic basic standard? How is anyone to understand what anyone is saying? Dib starts to feel maybe this place is not ‘okay’ and also like he might cry.

There’s a row of beverages near the bottom that are all filled with clear liquid. Dib is debating if it would be weird to buy all of them or pick one and hope it wasn’t space acid.

He tries to peak over the aisles to observe what everyone else is doing, and sees a large, purple, squishy thing wrap each individual four tentacles around a different bag of chips. The purple issue seems to twist around and Dib feels like he’s making inappropriate eye contact with it and quickly looks away.

“Fuck it”, he says to himself, and grabs a small bottle with a blue label from the clear liquids row. If he dies at least he won’t have to hear the same stupid lecture from Zim on proper ship maintenance. Dib maintains there are no other ways to eat those damn granola bars and Zim should just deal with it.

Dib moves to cash out and he mimes out in silence that he would like to purchase the drink by moving the drink and the card interchangeably between himself and the counter with large, grand movements.

“You’d like to purchase the water?” The cashier asks, in perfect English. Dib feels kind of like an ass.

“Yes, please.” He says, and slides Zim’s card across the table.

The clerk sucks it up and scans it through some sort of complicated machinery. If Dib’s honest, it just looks like a fancy credit card reader. Except, unlike a credit card reader, it makes a horrible noise at him when it spits Zim’s card out.

“It says there’s an error.” The clerk says, and Dib can literally feel his hands strangling Zim. Zim isn’t even here, but he can feel the ghost of stranglings future. Of course he would give him some sort of empty card. Zim’s probably completely broke or left him here for dead.

“I-” Dib starts, before being spectacularly interrupted by Zim, who had, apparently, not left Dib for dead. Zim throws open the doors and screams: “It is of the utmost urgency that we leave as inconspicuously as possible.”

Dib has never felt such embarrassment.

Before Dib can voice his embarrassment, the clerk is yelling for someone to lock the doors and Zim is skidding across the floor to grab Dib by the scruff of his coat. He’s yanked into the air. He hears the scratching of metal on linoleum. He sees Zim’s spider legs shoot out from under him. They make it through the doors. Dib’s jacket is bunching uncomfortably around his arm, and he becomes worried he might dislocate his shoulder. Before this can happen, he’s thrown into the ships loading hutch. He scrambles backwards as the doors close, and then he’s sent tumbling ass over tits as the ship starts off with a sickening lurch.

Dib is laying in the center of the room, sick and confused. He waits a couple beats to gather his wits.

“What” Dib asks, upon gathering his wits “the fuck was that?”

Zim hisses in between his teeth and smacks something on the dashboard, causing the ship to jerk unsteadily again.

“Nothing to concern yourself with, Dib-worm.” He says, and every word is making Dib concerned. “Some planets can be temperamental. They get all- freaky about stuff.”

Dib doesn’t know how to respond. He’s severely worried about if what just happened was the galactic norm for ‘freaky about stuff’.

The ship jerks a final time, but Zim seems content about it, slumping into the pilot’s seat.

“But” Zim sticks one finger in the air. “The ship is fueled and Zim managed to load a cargo of water into the storage unit. You may now praise me.” He grins lazily at Dib.

Dib hums noncommittally, and decides to keep his mouth shut for now. It’s difficult to get direct information out of Zim, and Dib needs time to plan his approach. Whether Zim will admit it or not, Dib smells that something is rotten in the state of space. The ship of Denmark? The state of space-mark?

Dib’s not the best with metaphors, but Zim is still up to something.

-

Space is fascinating. The infinite mystery of the universe is captivating and awe-inspiring and mind-numbingly boring after four hours of nothing but staring at it. Once the wonder of looking at identical star systems and occasional asteroids wears off, Dib realizes that space is a lot and a lot of empty space. He’s been staring vacantly out the dashboard for some time now. His brain is rotting to the point where he’s resorted to childhood road trip games, pretending that a little something is hopping along from solar system to another, trying to keep up alongside the ship.

Boredom, however, is productive to plan-making. And does Dib have a plan.

“Zim,” he says, and watches his invisible animal leap to the next planet. “I think I’m going insane.”

Zim makes a noise. “You’re already insane.” He doesn’t even turn around in his seat. Rude.

Dib ignores him.

“I can feel myself going insane,” Dib says. “And if I go insane, then we both go insane, and we’re going to die out here lost and insane in the cold vacuum of space.”

The creature makes a precarious jump across star systems and lands on a tiny purple asteroid.  It skitters and prepares to take another leap.

When Zim doesn’t answer Dib answers for him. He tries to make the next part sound as unrehearsed as possible. “Let’s stop at some cool tourist planet. We can chat with some locals, eat some weird alien food that’s not expired granola bars.” Dib gets excited about the prospect of eating something other than a granola bar, and rushes on the last part.

He’s convinced he’s failed his plan to get Zim to pull over when Zim makes a dramatic, elongated thinking noise. “Fine,” He says. “But only because I need to pick up some things. Do not even ask what it is because I will not tell you. Because it’s none of your business. Don’t question me.”

Dib blinks, and feels a smile slowly stretch his face.

“Seriously?”

Zim waves his hand authoritatively. “Don’t get too excited, Dib-meats.” He warns. “We will only be there for a couple of minutes. Long enough for me to pick up my secret package and for you to absorb nutrition, or whatever it is you do.”

Dib is mildly concerned about whatever secret nonsense Zim is waving in his face and telling him not to ask about, but all would fall into place in accordance with his plan. They would get to the planet, and Dib would force Zim to tell him what was going on or he would- well Dib hadn’t really thought that part out yet. Make a scene or something. Also, hell, real food. He feels his stomach turn at the idea of eating another high-protein snack bar.

During the whole landing Dib is practically bouncing on the balls of his feet. Zim had been trying to explain to him the process of landing on a heavy-traffic planet- something about parking circles and being translated into beams of light particles. Assuming Zim was just talking some usual shit, Dib had ignored the whole lecture. This ended up being a problem when Zim landed the ship into one of the docking circles, and Dib’s physical form was translated into a beam of light particles.

It feels like being everywhere and nowhere all at once. Like Dib is aware of each individual particle and where it is located, but none of them coalesce. He feels squeezed and stretched and breathless and then all in an eighth of a second he’s standing with his very real feet on the ground in the terminal. Instantly, he retches onto the floor.

The whole process gives him a bit of an existential crisis.

The terminal looks like a train station. Or at least what Dib imagines a train station to look at because he’s actually never been on a train, or at a train station. There are organized docking areas where various species were materialized in a glow of pink light, and then flights of stairs that lead up onto the surface. Zim leads them up the closest row of stairs, and they’re deposited right into what looks like the center of the city.

It’s like he’s stepping into the middle of Time’s Square, and absolutely and completely not at all. Thick crowds of different species jostle past Dib on the sidewalk, grunting and growling in a million different tongues. If you tilt your head back, you can’t even see where the skyscrapers end. They jut up from the ground like monolith fingers reaching up endlessly into a cloudy atmosphere to scrape at the skin of outer space. Flitting bugs of ships dart uncertainly amongst the buildings. Dib has no idea what keeps them from crashing into one another. It’s thrilling.

“You might as well wear a stupid flashy neck-thing that screams ‘kidnap me and sell me into sex slavery’”. Zim sighs, coming up from behind him. “Do not leave within two inches of my space or I will put you on a collar.”

“Kinky.” Dib says automatically, just to hear Zim’s indignant spluttering.

Zim grabs his wrist, and starts an already losing fight against the crowds.

“You are” Zim says and walks into a large slimy thing “such an embarrassing, lumbering child.”

Dib doesn’t care- he can’t seem to get the stupid smile off of his face. He grins at someone with one huge eye and three little horns.

“What, am I gonna ruin your street cred, Zim?” He snorts.

“Yes.” 

Despite being knocked against a million different objects, aliens, things, Dib tries to look around and memorize every ounce of information he can. Its unlikely Zim’s going to let them check out another planet ever again and, hell, he’s on an alien planet. Almost definitely the first human to ever step foot here. One small step for Dib, and one giant step for mankind.

Immediately, Dib takes a step right into someone. They were barely under his eyelevel and Dib had been so busy making an ass out of himself that he didn’t even notice that he had ran right into someone. He looks down to apologize- and wait he knows this species. He feels a little fluttering on inclusion, of pride.

“Hey,” He says. “You’re Irken, aren’t you?”

It looks up at him with big, pink eyes and drops all of the papers it’s holding. They take off into the wind and get caught underfoot the heavy traffic within seconds. There’s a tense, heavy beat where Dib is convinced it might say something.

And then the hold on his wrist becomes rather insistent and he’s pulled and then pushed ass first into an alcove between two sky-scrapers.

“Ow.” Dib says because his ass hurts and his tailbone might be broken and Zim didn’t really need to push him.

“What did you think you were doing?” Zim hisses.

“I bumped into them.” It was the truth, he had simply bumped into him. The little guy looked unassuming enough, and besides wouldn’t Zim want to interact with someone from his own species? Dib doesn’t see what the big deal is.

Zim runs his nails down his face. It looks painful, and Dib is completely overwhelmed with how much of a huge drama queen Zim is literally all of the time.

“Just.” Zim lets out a thin scream from the back of his throat. It could probably break glass. “Stay next to me and don’t talk to anyone.”

Dib gets the impression Zim might be a little stressed out.

Having no intent of listening to anything Zim says, Dib tries to sneak a glance through the crowd and sees the Irken frantically trying to tug his papers together. It looks like a lost cause. The crowd is supremely apathetic to his plight. He’s small- maybe even smaller than Zim. With a triumphant noise Dib can hear even through the throng, he dislodges the paper and in the split second that he flips it over and tucks it under his arm Dib swears he sees something familiar. Someone familiar.

He tells himself it’s nothing, because Irkens all look basically the same when you get right down to it. But a little seed of uneasy buries itself in the pit of his stomach, and Dib feels the bile from earlier rise back up in his throat.  

Zim grabs his chin and forces him to look back over at him. Dib reckons with how tight Zim is squeezing his cheeks, he probably kind of looks like a constipated fish.

Dib reassures Zim that no, he’s not going to leave his side again and yes, he’s capable of not talking to anyone, and, God, for the fourteenth time his head isn’t that big. His hair is naturally thick, it gives him the appearance of a big head.  

The alcove he’s been pulled into turns out to be a narrow alleyway that connects to many similar looking narrow alleyways. Dib has no idea if Zim’s decided he can’t be trusted to take the main roads or if this happens to be their intended alleyway, but Zim decides to follow it, hand trailing along the sides of the buildings as they walk. With how impossibly high the buildings are it feels intensely claustrophobic. It smells of something strong, and of urine. The ground is uneven with garbage and the decay of a consistently moist and treaded ground. 

Zim leads them farther and farther into a mess of corridors, and the overlay of paths is so hopelessly confusing Dib feels more like they’re in a bowl of noodles, thin and tangled up within each other. A couple crisscrossing alleyways, and Dib’s convinced they’re hopelessly lost. It’s like he’s Alice, and he’s going down into the rabbit hole that he swears he’s never going to find his way back from. Maybe Zim is planning on killing him and letting him bleed out on the musty corridor floor. Or maybe they’re going to wander around in this concrete hedge maze until they die of dehydration or boredom or both.

They turn another fork in the road. Dib’s about to ask Zim what the fuck is happening when he sees it. Built ride into the side of the building like a barnacle into a ship’s hull is what looks like an entrance to a bar. A glowing neon sign casts an unnatural, flickering glow onto the wall across it.

Zim seems happy enough to find the place. He fastens his hand around Dib’s wrist again.

“The room will be crowded. Do not look anyone in the eye unless you wish to be kidnapped and subsequently flayed. Understand?” Zim asks.

Well, alright.

“Like a Pokemon battle?” Dib asks, amused, because he doesn’t know how else to respond to that.

All he gets in return is a blank stare and a sneer. He tries to explain that it’s an Earth culture thing and Zim informs him that he really didn’t give a “fuck that flies”. Dib tries, again, to explain to him that that’s not how the phrase even goes, jesus christ, before he marks it as a losing battle and gives up.

Dib has a lot of these arguments. He’s learning when to explain and when to give up, and “give up” comes up a lot more often these days.

Having agreed to the pre-offered Pokemon-style bar rules, Zim manhandles Dib in front of the doors. It’s glassy, reflective, and Dib is reminded of those two way mirrors you see in crime show interrogation rooms. Zim throws back his shoulders, waves his hands in front of the doors. It pops open with a click and Dib is quickly thrown inside, taking with him the last bit of light.

Sound. The first thing Dib’s aware of is the sound. The sound physically moves up through the soles of his feet, sending out an electrical current of vibration into the marrow of his bones. He can feel it all the way to the tingling of his tongue. The air stinks with the combined humid breath of a thousand species, packing the room tight like sardines in a square tin, moving, writhing, dancing. Almost instantly, Dib misses the silence and the coolness of the alleyways. He tries to shout this to Zim, but Zim must not hear him because he grabs Dib tighter and starts to pull him close behind through the mass of clubbers. Heeding Zim’s warning about not being left behind, Dib follows.

If Dib thought the corridors were claustrophobic, this was suffocation. He feels like the weight of each individual’s skin is weighing down on his chest. His vibrating, white-light-flashing chest. The only thing keeping him anchored and moving forward is the pressure of Zim’s hand around his wrist, the cool rubber of the glove pressed against the sensitive skin under his hand.

They pop out from the crowd into a less-populated bar area. The other part of the club must be the dance floor, and the sheer difference in number of patrons has Dib wondering if there’s more than one bar around the place. The bass is still loud, but has been left behind with the dancers. It feels more like a bass line and less like Dib’s molecules might wiggle themselves out of place. He’s tugged over to the counter and, exhausted from his brief encounter with the dance floor, Dib slips onto an empty barstool. Zim leans on the counter beside him.

He remembers Zim talking about picking something up but, to be frank, he has no idea what a person like Zim is doing in a place like this.

Dib turns to Zim and asks: “What the fuck are we doing here?” He’s glad that he can be heard, and that he doesn’t have to shout anymore.

Zim looks up at him and grins wickedly.

“We are here to pick something up.” He says.

As if to punctuate his statement, two shot glasses slide across the counter. Dib has no recollection of Zim even motioning to order something. Zim scoots one glass an inch towards Dib.

“Cheers, Dib-worm.” He says, and then throws back the other shot like a fucking champ.

This is all so fucking out of control. He’s got to be in an alternate dimension. An alternate dimension where he travels to alien planets and he’s not worried about the fate of the Earth and he watches Zim’s throat muscles slide and his Adam’s apple bob as he takes shots with expertise that comes only from seasoned practice. In the spirit of madness, Dib takes the shot and tries to shoot it with the same amount of grace as Zim does.

He doesn’t. He almost vomits on the floor. What the hell is that shit? Lighter fluid? Dib is starting to wonder if he’s going to make almost-vomiting while drinking a habit.

He must have said the part about lighter fluid out loud because Zim throws back his head and laughs, loudly and genuinely. Anyone looking on would think that they were friends, out for a night of fun and companionship. Dib stares at him, watches his eyes crinkle and the way he laughs unabashedly and wholeheartedly and is struck with anxiety as he remembers the last situation when he and Zim were drunk and he couldn’t stop staring at him. God, he’s such an idiot. The last time could have ruined his life and now all he can think about is how he wants to ruin it again. And again and again.

“Poor Earth child can drink his planet’s spirits, but not his enemy’s” Zim says, and lifts his shot glass into the air. “Irk wins again.”

“You’re a terror, you know that?” Dib says instead of anything else. Anything stupid.

Zim smiles brilliantly and makes a motion to someone behind the bar.

“My ingenuous is often mistaken for insanity. Easy mistake for lower life forms such as yourself to make.”

Dib scoffs. “Ingenious? Yeah, okay.”

“I am prone to bouts of ingenuity.” Zim says, and waves his arms in a wide, tipsy gesture that almost knocks over the drinks replacing the empty shot glasses. The bartender gives them a look and Dib hastens to reassure him.

“Don’t worry about him.” Dib says “He’s prone to bouts of ingenuity.”

Zim punches him in the chest. Hard.

“He doesn’t speak your Earth dialect, idiot-jerk.” Zim says, and sticks half his hand in his drink. He fishes out a fat, writhing tentacle and pops it into his mouth. Dib is disgusted.

Grimacing at him, Dib sips his drink. He’s determined not to flinch this time. It tastes like the underside of a dead fish, and he does flinch. Zim cackles at him. Dib tries to maintain that he flinched because of the taste, and not because of the alcohol, but Zim is not having it.

The drinks settle with a warm burn in the center of his stomach, and makes his limbs feel heavy as his head is light. If the way Zim is blowing through his drinks is any indication, he’s probably just as tipsy as Dib. He’s hardly touched his second drink, but Zim seems intent on drowning himself in it. Zim’s small, he’s got to be more of a lightweight than Dib, alien advantage be damned. Maybe the little mechanical regulator on his back filtered out the alcohol almost as fast as Zim could drink it, and he had to basically become a fish to even keep a buzz.

Dib realizes that he’s been staring at Zim for several moments now and curses himself. Obviously he’s just an affectionate drunk. Or a horny drunk. This doesn’t have to have anything to do with Zim. When he drinks he gets all sappy and it’s hard to remember who you’re supposed to dislike when your head gets all fuzzy and warm. And its Zim’s fault for dragging him in here and plying him with drinks and having the gall to stand there looking all lithe and alien and attractive.

Zim looks over at him and gives him another one of those genuine, wild smiles, and Dib wonders when that started happening, and when he started thinking of them as smiles and not as smirks. Fuck is he in deep.

Before he can gain his bearings and get himself back on the righteous path of ignoring the fuck out of this, Zim is setting his empty glass on the counter and saddling up close in between the ‘v’ of Dib’s legs. He sets his hands down on either of Dib’s thighs.

“Dance with Zim, lover-boy.” He says, and Dib’s already lost that argument. “Give up” comes up a lot more often these days. 

He tries to at least pretend to argue. Tells Zim that he really doesn’t want to dive back into the thick crowed of people, that he almost had a panic attack last time. But he’s not having it. Dib’s tugged off of his stool, drink forgotten, and they become instantly, seamlessly absorbed into the throng.

Dib’s aware of very few things at once-probably due to the alcohol. He’s aware of the stifling heat of a thousand collected bodies moving against him. He’s aware of the music making his teeth chatter. Most importantly though, he’s aware of the press of Zim against his chest closer to him than they’ve been since they fucked, cool in comparison to the air hugging his skin. He feels little puffs of Zim’s breath against his neck and even that feels cool, causing a ripple of goosebumps to break out across his collarbone.

The world narrows down to the places where he can feel he and Zim touching. His left thigh, his forearms, and a five inch expanse across his ribcage become hyper-aware focal points of his life. Despite the crowd, Dib doesn’t even feel suffocated until Zim leans in close and winds his arms around his neck. Then everything he sees is Zim’s face, eyes half-lidded. Something swells up in Dib’s chest, something stupid and incredible and dangerous. Zim’s hips are flush with his, swaying slowly to some beat in the music that Dib can’t discern right now. Has no hope of discerning right now when he is dizzy and bright with some feeling.

Zim’s face is revealed to him in flashes. Once awash in pink, and then a split second in blue, and then in pink again. The strobes lull him into a trance: Pink, blue, pink again. Pink, blue, pink again. The thing pressing against his chest threatens to crawl out of his mouth and make him do something he’ll regret. Pink. Zim’s face is so close to his he could just almost lean forward and feel his mouth against his. Blue.

He can feel the warmth of Zim’s breath on his mouth when the lights come on. Not pink- yellowing florescent lights. They’re harsh, and near-blinding. Dib reels back from Zim, and knocks into someone behind him, rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes. He’s barely noticed. Someone screams, and then someone else screams, and then the unmistakable noise of a megaphone.

“Everybody remain calm.” The megaphone says, causing an instant murmur of not-calm. Something twists in the pit of Dib’s stomach and it’s definitely not calm. “We have received intelligence that a fugitive wanted by the empire has infiltrated this building. Turn over the Irken Zim to us, and no one will be harmed.”

This is immediately followed up with everyone around Dib backing up to create a huge and obvious circle around Zim who is, apparently, the only Irken in the building.

Zim goes ashen, and Dib feels the panic burn up the alcohol in his blood fast.

“What did you do?” Dib asks. His voice is deadly still.

In a second, he feels myself losing the ground beneath his feet. Zim flips him in midair and he’s left twenty feet up, gripping the back of Zim’s shirt and trying not to fall off his skinny shoulder. Dib squints his eyes shut, determined not to throw up or, worse, scream. Zim skitters across the floor on wobbly, metal spider’s legs. They break out into the alleyway and Dib is assaulted with the sharp smell of piss again. Zim drops him on the floor. He lands hard on his back and feels the wind knocked out of him like a sucker punch to the stomach and Zim tells him to run.

Today is giving Dib such major whiplash.

Working on sheer adrenaline and self-preservation, Dib picks himself off the floor and sprints after Zim, who’s already back to being bipedal and making good use of it. Something he’s starting to remember from his time back on Earth: Zim’s fucking fast- Dib feels his ribs starting to cramp trying to keep up with him. The air he breathes burns his throat on its way out.

Zim makes a sharp turn, and Dib sees a line of rotting, metal dumpsters bordering the side of the building. Whether Zim knew these were here or if he formed the plan on the spot Dib doesn’t know, but Zim sprints in between two dumpsters, and orders Dib to flip one of the lids inside out so that it rests on the edge of the other lid, creating a roofed shelter. It’s slimy and heavy, and Dib can just barely reach it, but it works. 

It’s like sitting in a vat of hot garbage juice. It brings back memories of the Shadowhog’s toilet, except somehow worse. The area is small and cramped, and both Zim and Dib have to sit with their legs pulled up to their chests to even fit. Zim wraps his arms around his bunched legs, and hunches over in the dark. It would make him look almost vulnerable if he didn’t look like a squinty cockroach.

They sit there, barely daring to breathe for making noise until Dib breaks the silence.

“You’re hiding something from me.” Dib says.

Zim sneers. “Shut up.”

“When your card got declined at the gas station, I wasn’t going to say anything because I thought you were just broke or something-”

Zim makes a highly offended noise. As if being broke was worse than being- whatever the fuck he was. A wanted murderer, maybe.

“But now I don’t know what to think. What else are you lying about, Zim? Did you make this whole bond thing up? Huh? Is your mission even real? Are you some sort of-some sort of alien bounty hunter? Gonna sell me here for money? Huh, Zim?” Dib feels himself getting hysterical.

A muscle jumps in Zim’s jaw and his face darkens. Petulantly, he kicks his feet out at Dib as hard as he can. Which is pretty fucking hard, Dib is definitely gonna be bruised later. He scowls at Zim, and Zim snarls audibly back at him, teeth gnashing.

Zim opens his mouth and is stopped cold from whatever stupid thing he’s going to say next by a jarring crash nearby that stills them both. It sounds like a shout and Dib’s blood freezes solid ice remembering the deep voice of the megaphones. Seconds ooze by. Dib strains his ears to hear sounds of life. The world is absolutely silent besides Zim’s shallowed breathing and the rhythmic dripping of some liquid pooling around the dumpsters. After a couple moments, he allows himself to breathe again.

Zim, predictably, immediately opens his mouth. “You can shove your-”

Dib doesn’t get to learn where he can shove his whatever because he is blinded for the second time today as the lid above them is tossed to back onto the trash can, and Dib realizes that he is not having a bad day. He is having an awful day. Perhaps the worst day of his life. Oh, God. They’re doomed and they’re gonna go to space jail and rot there because Zim is a mass-murderer and a bounty hunter and probably also cheats on his taxes. His space taxes.

Standing in front of them, hands on his hips and at an impressive height of barely taller than Dib while he was sitting down, was the little Irken Dib had nearly run over earlier. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. Running him over was probably some sort of irreparable stain on his honor and how he’s going to turn them in as sweet revenge. Dib’s about to be apprehended by a four foot three space-bug for accessory to Zim’s felony because he didn’t have the decency to watch where he was going. Next chance he gets he’s going to break Zim’s face, handcuffs or not.

Struggling to stand, Zim makes an incredulous noise at the Irken that sounds an awful lot like “skoodge”. Dib realizes belatedly, looking at the grimace of recognition on the little Irken face that oh that’s its name. Which means that Zim knows who this Irken is. Which means that Dib has no idea what’s going on anymore and even if they’re not going to rot in intergalactic space jail he’s still going to break Zim’s face.

It also means that Zim knows who he ran into earlier and is a massive jerk. 

The little Irken- “Skoodge”, Dib reminds himself, which keeps catching him off guard because he thought Irkens had a three letter name trend going on- presses his finger to his lips in a shushing motion, the universal sign for telling Zim to shut the fuck up. Naturally, Zim does not take the hint and says “Skoodge” again, twice as loud. The little Irken starts to look frantic, and in the spirit of helpfulness, Dib leans across his lap and slaps his hand over Zim’s mouth. He has no idea whether or not Skoodge is on their side, but no harm can come from Zim shutting the fuck up, especially when cops or an angry mob might be hot on their trail.

In three little bursts, Dib hears a couple things all at once. He hears shouts from above, far away and overlapping one another. Then he hears a horrifying metallic groan, and then a couple, short zipping sounds. The buildings are tall, Dib remembers not being able to see the tops of them, but he’s too scared to take a glance up and see how high up the sounds are. They’ve got to be at least some miles up. A couple tense seconds of silence follow, where Dib feels vulnerable and fragile. When the sounds don’t persist, Skoodge seems to relax. They sigh a collective breath of relief and Dib feels a wet, warm pressure on his hand and realizes that ugh Zim is licking him.

“Gross, Zim, what the fuck is your damage?”

“My ‘damage’ is you touching me, dirt pig.” Zim says, and sticks his tongue out.

“You didn’t seem to have a problem with it earlier.” Dib says, wiping his hand off on his pants. God, Zim just pisses him off so much sometimes.

Skoodge clears his throat and Zim looks at him like he’s just now remembered that he’s there. Which he’s obviously not since he was talking to him just forty seconds ago- Zim’s just a shit. A shit who licks people’s hands. “A shit you were about to make out with ten minutes ago”, some traitorous part of his brain reminds him. Temporary insanity, he tells himself. And alcohol. Happens to the best of us.

“Sorry guys, but you’re not out of the clear quite yet,” Skoodge says, wringing his hands and sounding genuinely apologetic and Zim scoffs. Dib feels kinda bad for Skoodge. Dib would feel bad for anyone who’s had to maintain a conversation with Zim. “I’m going to need you to come with me, unfortunately.”

Dib agrees. It is unfortunate.

He turns to Dib and offers him a half smile and two upturned palms of peace offering. Dib notices that he’s not wearing the same uniform that he’s seen normal Irkens wear either, but rather a similar black get-up. “I apologize that we don’t have more time for introductions. Boss has me running on a tight schedule here.”

Zim sneers. “I’m not going anywhere with you.” Crouching between some dumpsters on a dirty garbage and urine-stained floor, it’s not that threatening of a denial. Plus, seeing as it looked like Skoodge just saved their asses from the intergalactic police force, Dib is planning on doing exactly that- especially if it means Zim isn’t going. In fact, he’d probably go just because Zim isn’t going.

“I’m afraid you don’t have much of a choice.” Skoodge says, turning back to Zim. It looks like he might apologize again, but he doesn’t. Instead, he reaches behind himself into his metal backpack and grabs a little device that he’s sure he’s seen Zim use before to communicate with his idiot robot. He clicks something on it, and it emits a high-frequency static noise. The noise stops when he holds another button in, and he speaks into it.

“Ixane, this is Unit 309. Can you track and beam up my location? I found something the general might be-” Skoodge pauses and gives them a sidelong glance, “interested in.”

“Interested” doesn’t sound too promising. Dib starts to wonder if maybe he was too hasty in his earlier judgement of Zim. Zim’s ship isn’t that bad. Hell, he even kinda liked the shitty granola bars. Maybe space jail wouldn’t be that bad either. He’s seen a lot of Law and Order. He knows how jail works.

A crackle pop from the walkie-talkie and then a curt “Affirmative”. Dib opens his mouth to speak up and try to back out, maybe turn himself over to the authorities when he’s engulfed with familiar pink light.

“Fuck,” Dib says.

His stomach lurches when his skin glows pink under the lights. Getting “beamed” is not something Dib thinks he’s ever going to get used to, even if he does it a million times in a row. He can feel each molecule separate from one another. When he comes back together, he fights very hard not to vomit, and manages to keep down his gagging. His knees lock up from being dropped onto another ship floor, and Dib’s sure that’s the only reason he’s still standing. He looks over, and wants to gag again when he sees Zim standing, chin up like they waltzed right the fuck in here.

A couple seconds is what Dib gets to gather his life together and think, very clearly, how this is definitely the worst day anyone’s ever had in the whole entire galaxy.

And then there’s someone talking. A voice that Dib recognizes in some far off, fuzzy area of his memory. Someone he hasn’t heard in years. It has a slight foreign lilt to it, soft and melodic but with an undercurrent of sharp, well-worn iron. A voice he used to know, but has been morphed from seasoned and well-earned years of hard battle.

“This is almost too perfect.” The voice is saying, and Dib is trying so hard to place his finger on where he remembers this voice. He knows this person. He knows this person. 

Zim growls. “I should have known you would have been behind this-”

The realization snaps to Dib with a gasp. No, there’s no way. He tries to talk but shock has frozen his vocal cords so he jerks his head up and makes eye contact with someone he thought had died a long, long time ago.

“Tak.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > remember when i said this was gonna come out a week after chapter two? i lied. what was originally gonna be chapter two was this section combined with what is actually chapter two right now, which is like. 14000 words or something. which means i wrote 4000 words out of my net which is why this section took six million years. im not abandoning this fic, it's just owning my ass  
> > i like to entertain myself with the idea that this is the halfway mark of the fic. it makes me feel better about myself. this is more like the end of the introduction of the entire plot. im still planning on only having two more chapters but im sure my beta will yell at me to cut it up so i get a chapter out a. in the next year and b. thats not 50000 words or something  
> > theres like sixteen stupid references in here shoutout to you if you find them  
> > fun fact: my original original plan for this didnt include this whole entire section OR the last whole entire section. i was gonna introduce tak as landing back on earth in the first section, but this story gets away from me  
> > im ngl the next section is gonna be a long time coming. theres a lot of plot things that need to happen and a lot of Exposition and Explaining and other boring stuff so its gonna be informative but Long and Difficult and im also a suffering college student that needs to write things that arent novel length invader zim gay fanfiction but lets be real im gonna ignore that to continue writing gay invader zim fanfiction  
> > leave a review and talk to me im so lonely


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sent this draft to jhonens house written out of magazine letters and he personally wrote me back and told me i own zim now :/
> 
> thx to mrsbigfoot on tumblr 4 continuing to care abt this fic an entire year later

There’s something to be said for Zim’s tenacity, at least. Even in the face of concrete evidence that he’s a large-scale fuck-up moron he’s still maintaining that this is exactly what he was going for, really. This is just step one in his convoluted master plan of idiocy. In this case, the concrete evidence happens to be the giant concrete cell that he and Dib are encased in, supposedly for the rest of time and space until they rot, so, Dib isn’t exactly ready to just let this one go.

“Does a truthful word ever come out of your mouth, Zim? Just wondering.”

Zim stomps his foot and hisses.

“Liars! Liars and rats and _fleas_ with diseases! Do you really think you can trust Tak over me?” Unsurprisingly, Dib does think this. Since Zim is a large-scale fuck-up moron. And has tried to blow him up on multiple occasions.

“Why would I trust you? You’ve done nothing but lie this entire trip. You could’ve gotten me killed- you have a death warrant sitting on your head!” He gestures to the whole room, because, like, _honestly._ “And I like Tak. She hates you.”

A strangled noise is torn from Zim and he yanks one antennae over the side of his head, weaving it between his fingers to get a better grip. “It was a misunderstanding, you insolent foolboy! I was on my way to correct it, and then neither of us would be in trouble.”

Dib starts, chest heaving and eyes wide. Then he barks a hard choked up laugh of disbelief that hurts his throat. “I wasn’t in any trouble at all! Not from the empire, and not from you or your stupid fake mission that Tak told me about.”

Zim screams and launches himself at him. Dib, surprised, stumbles under the weight and falls hard on the floor. Air rushes out of him in a whoosh. Bright little dots erupt across his vision and he tries furiously to blink them away. A hot liquid that has to be blood has started to pool around his neck and Zim is still trying to scratch his fucking guts out. Regaining his breath, he uses all his strength to buck Zim off of him and rolls away as far as he can before he hits another wall, trying to be careful not to bump his head on anything else and worsen what could already be a bad concussion. He thinks that The Resisty probably won’t spare medical supplies to two rowdy prisoners.

And even though it feels like his brain might be leaking out the back of his skull, this feels easy. Dib’s muscles practically fall into sense memory fighting Zim. He knows that Zim always feints left, but almost never feints to the right. He knows there’s a place under Zim’s sternum that almost always makes him vomit if he can hit it at the right angle. This feels natural. Like they were back on Earth and Dib had the fire in his belly of the sole protector of his race.

Except, he remembers as Zim swipes at his face, Earth doesn’t need a protector. Earth never really needed a protector. The only fire in his belly right now is because Zim deserves a swift kick in the jaw.

The next swipe Zim makes for his face, Dib feints up rather than down, swinging his leg up to deliver a satisfying thump against Zim’s midsection. Something cracks and Dib feels a heady rush of adrenaline. Zim kneels, and Dib takes the opportunity to use the momentum to backhand him around the temple, sending him sprawling against the floor.

It feels more than a little badass.

Shrieking, Zim rolls onto all fours and crawls towards Dib with alarming speed. This surprises Dib so much he allows himself to be knocked to the floor where Zim grabs around his kneecap and pulls.

“You would be nothing without me.” He hisses, scrambling away from Dib. “You would mean nothing to your boring underdeveloped planet if I hadn’t accidentally landed in your front yard.”

Blood starts to rush back into his brain and cools Dib’s nerve. He hasn’t fought with this stupid lizard this hard since he was like, sixteen maybe. Suddenly exhausted and dizzy, Dib tries for a weak kick in Zim’s direction from the floor and laughs hollowly. “And what did you have without me, huh, Zim? Not your mission, apparently.” Probably worth it to milk this fake mission thing as far as he can take it.

Laying on the floor, breathing heavily, making no move to come for Dib again, Zim looks up at him and says: “I hate you” and Dib knows it’s true and hates him back.

Dib takes several long breaths, but says nothing. He thinks he might say something witty or clever or hilarious, but then a voice sounds in the room that belongs to neither of them that’s starts Dib for a second.

“Can you guys please shut up? It’s the late shift and I just-I don’t care.”

There’s a hard, tense second where Zim and Dib are still looking at each other before they both realize, seemingly at the same time, that it came from an intercom system.

Dib looks up at the ceiling and laughs humorlessly.

“Just a general question, Zim,” Dib says, ignoring the intercom. “Do you absolutely have to ruin everything in my entire life? Does it bring you that much joy?”

“I mean,” Zim touches the bottom of his collarbone in fake contemplation. “Yes.”

Dib tries to be angry but is empty instead. He used up all of his anger with that sweet backhand and now all he feels raw and tired. Spending several moments contemplating the actual unlikeliness of how exhaustingly difficult his life is all of the time, he’s drained. Mathematically, it cannot be possible for his life to be this difficult. They spend several minutes in a heavy, stuffy silence.

“We have to talk about this deal they’re giving us,” He says, finally.

“I’m sure” Zim says “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. In fact, if I did know what you were talking about, which I don’t” he adds, “Zim would be reporting you to the proper authorities so they could pop your overgrown revolutionist head like a greasy pimple.”

More taken back by the comparison of his head to a zit of all things than the actual insult, Dib almost doesn’t catch onto what Zim is trying to say. 

“And what about you, Zim? Huh? You think they’re just gonna let you off with a warning because you made your own arrest a little easier?”

Zim snorts. Dib has no idea how he accomplishes this without a nose and is minorly irritated about it. “I have friends in higher circles that your stupid Earth-rotted brain could never comprehend.”

Ignoring the irony of “higher circles,” Dib chooses to become extremely exasperated. “You don’t have any friends, Zim! All you have is me, and I’d hardly call myself your friend. If it weren’t for me we’d both be incinerated by now!”

The intercom system decides to speak up again just as Zim opens his stupid mouth. Not all heroes wear capes.

“They would definitely incinerate you,” it says.  

Zim stumbles to his feet and points at the ceiling, waving and jabbing his finger at the air as if it could kill the sound waves for defying him. “Did the mighty Zim ask for your opinion, insignificant voice drone? I do not think so!”

The voice apologizes, not sounding sorry at all.

Dib sighs, resting his head in the crook of his knee, the soft material of his pants weirdly comforting. Everything was weird right now, but at least his pants were weirdly comforting. It’s obvious he’s going to have to tackle this from a different angle. Zim is never going to accept that anybody could hold ill will towards him, especially the race he came from. They were going to rot here until they died with Zim’s last wheezy, nasally breath decreeing his greatness.

Because the only thing Zim cares about more than anything else is himself.

Dib starts. The only thing Zim cares more than anything else is himself.

“Zim,” Dib says, raising his head to meet Zim’s eyes. He tries to hold them, conveying desperation with his eyes as much with his voice. “We are being offered two front row seats to making galactic history. If you can pull this off, we would be leading an entire army. An entire revolution- an entire generation of people all following your orders.” Zim’s eyes widen at that, and Dib has to push down his internal celebration and keep his face a mask of innocence and honesty.

“You can be bigger than Irk. You can be bigger than the empire, even. You can be ‘The Resisty.” Dib makes sure to take in a shaky breath, filing the name with a sort of awe. Is Drama Club a useless extracurricular for his resume now, Dad?

“The Resisty is a stupid name,” Zim says, but Dib notices how he’s still frozen still, eyes wide.

“Okay, that’s fair.” Don’t make any sudden movements, Dib. “But that’s not the point. The point is you could be so powerful, you could change the name to whatever you want.”

Thankfully, the intercom decided not to speak up, which Dib was internally grateful for since he wasn’t so sure about the validity of his last statement.

Still maintaining eye contact, Zim slides along the floor. He nervously runs his hands up and down the sides of his legs, making little skittering motions with his fingers.

“I suppose it is possible that Zim may make,” he stops and steadies his hands on his knees “a good, or perhaps better leader for the universe than most.”

Dib remains silent, not daring to move a muscle and break Zim out of the fragile state of mind he shuffled him into.

Zim finally breaks the eye contact by squaring his shoulders and looking superciliously at the far wall.

“I will consider it.”

Dib lets out a breath through clenched teeth, nods tightly, and doesn’t speak anymore.  

When Dib wakes up to a kick in the ribs the next morning he is wholly unsurprised. How did Zim know he’s always wanted to wake up to a fractured rib? What a kind friend.

“Bow down before your new ruler, fiend.”

“What?” Dib wheezes.

He feels Zim’s weight shift backwards, presumably for another kick to the guts, and Dib punches out blindly with one arm. His elbow hits Zim in the shin mid strike, and he hears the unmistakable sound of Zim crashing to the floor. Bullseye.

Clutching his ribs with his other arm, Dib rolls onto his back to get a look at Zim. “You will pay for that when I am given my position, monkey-stench.”

And then it all clicks together and Dib gets it.

“You’re teaming up with the Resisty?” Dib asks.

Zim scoffs. “I am not,” he brings his hands up into air quotes “teaming up with The Resisty. I am staging a clever coup d’état.”

For a moment, Dib just blinks. “Where did you learn that phrase?”

“It does not matter!” Zim flaps his hand back and forth dismissively. “What matters is that I am in charge of you and the rest of the galaxy and I demand as ruler to be let out of this tiny grey box immediately.”

They do get shown out of their tiny grey box, after Dib translates Zim’s posturing to the intercom to mean “yes, we will accept the terms of our confinement, please do not starve us to death.” The alien that comes to pick them up looks insect-like and carries some large-looking plasma thing, which Dib finds a little excessive but has far more sense than to say so. Without speaking, he approaches Dib and touches something on his head. Dib has no idea what to do. Is this a greeting? Is this some form of communication to mean “I will not kill you”? He looks over at Zim. Why isn’t Zim doing anything? After a couple tense moments, Dib awkwardly touches his head in the same place and the alien gives him a strange look. It gestures with one of its appendages to follow it, and Dib falls in line behind it, feeling oddly like he’s failed some test.

“Don’t know how you put up with it, myself,” the thing garbles eventually, rolling one giant eye over to survey Zim. “Irken’s ain’t exactly my cup of jing if you know what I mean.” It rolls his other big eye over to eye Dib skeptically.

Dib has no idea what he means, but he’s eager to make up for his earlier mistake and, honestly, he’s totally right. How does he put up with it? He’s a saint.

“Eh?” Zim says, “I’ll have you know-” 

“It’s an incredible burden that I alone must bear. It takes years off my life, honestly.” Dib interrupts.

The alien nods it’s large head sagely. “Small, too,” it comments.

Zim scoffs with such vigor his voice breaks like a teenager’s. Dib is delighted. He loves Escort Alien and his excessive large plasma thing, he decides, even if he does weird things with the side of his head.

Throughout the tour, Dib notices that most of the ship is a glowing, gleaming white. He had thought, from Zim’s ship, that ships were sort of a pale yellow color by default, accented with smudges of pale brown. They’re white by default. Zim is just a horrible tiny goblin. He takes a moment to hate Zim. Each hallway leads to a different hallway in an endless repeating motion that seems incredibly easy to get lost in. Circular, handle-less doors line the hallways in a perfect symmetrical cavern, like rows of teeth in a giant mouth. They open swiftly every couple of seconds to allow different modge-podged groups of creatures in one door or out another, chattering away in some unidentifiable speak. It reminds Dib of an ant colony. A weird, multicultural ant colony.

“How come I can understand you, but not anyone else?” Dib asks Escort-Alien.

“Downloaded your language into my system,” it says, tapping a claw against what Dib can now see looks like a small Bluetooth on the side of its head. That must have been what he was doing earlier on. Dib feels even more like an idiot, but the pleasantness of his escort is dulling it significantly. “Can understand and project Earth.”

“It’s called ‘hyoo-man’ language,” Zim says, folding his arms and looking a little bit put out that no one was recognizing his genius on the subject.

“No one cares, Zim,” Dib says cheerfully.

With what are a relatively small amount of mutterings and outburst from Zim, they are shown the canteen, the showers and toilets, and led past a long hallway of private rooms. Meals are to be eaten thrice a day, at exact times to be announced by the meal bell. If you miss the bell, you miss the meal. Showers are open in ten shifts throughout the day depending on species. Since Dib is a special case, he may attend any of the carbon-based lifeform shower times. Dib should get a schedule some time in the next couple sols.

At the end of the long hallway of private rooms, is, Dib assumes, his own private room. He’s shown to a small door with a handle at the far wall that looks to have a sign taped over several other signs. The last sign is suspiciously yellowed. He doesn’t know what they say, but he’s assuming they all mean ‘shitty room.’

The room is shitty. Point one for Dib.

It looks like it could have once been a storage closet, but now has a small set of bunk beds pushed up into the corner. The realization dawns that of course the room is not for him, why would they board two supposed ancient married space husbands in separate rooms. It’s probably lucky they even get separate beds.

Despite trying to wedge the bed as far into the wall as possible, there’s still only enough room for one person to stand in front of the bed at a time comfortably. Between the beds, but halfway obscured by the top bunk, is a single, circular window, not more than a foot across.

Zim, of course, immediately claims the top bunk after a short lived argument about the room. Dib, out of the infinite kindness of his heart, allows him to have it. (Dib wants to watch out the window).

Glad to have a place to rest that isn’t concrete, Dib curls himself up on the bottom bunk. If he stretches his legs out, his feet hang off the bed a little bit, but he looks out the bottom half of his submarine window and sees endless, purple space and he feels, stupidly, more at home in this spare closet than he ever did at home. The realization makes him feel happier than he’s been in (honestly, weeks).

“Zim,” Dib asks the bottom of the mattress, feeling amiable “were you always a soldier?”

He hears a snort. “I am no soldier. I’m an invader, you lumpy sack of meat. And Zim is over four-hundred years old, he has had time for three, maybe four good careers beneficial to the Empire.”

“You’re not an invader anymore,” Dib points out uselessly.

Dib gets silence from the top bunk. He tries to imagine Zim as a doctor, or a cashier, and he finds he can’t picture Zim in anything but his military uniform, back straight on high alert.

“Did you just call me lumpy?” Dib asks.

“You are lumpy.” Zim shifts on the bed and the movement shakes the entire frame.

“Explain to me how I’m lumpy.”

“You have lumps,” Zim says defensively. “Your head is one giant lump.”

“Everybody has a head! You have a head,” Dib exclaims. There are definite lifeforms on this ship that Dib is pretty sure do not have a head, but he doesn’t bring that up.

“Yours is lumpier.” Zim shrugs. Dib can’t see him shrugging, physically, but he can feel it happening and it enrages him. His head isn’t lumpy.

His head probably isn’t lumpy.

“You lied to me.” Dib remembers suddenly.

“Eh? I am no liar. _You_ lie.” The bedframe shakes with what must be Zim’s emphatic pointing.

“No, Zim, shut up. You told me this Umeb-”

Zim interrupts. “ _Umon’tebha’_.”

“Right, okay, whatever. _Umon’tebha’_. You told me this _Umon’tebha’_ thing was one-sided. That when we, you know, it wasn’t something you were into. But Tak said only Irkens can initiate it, cause it’s like, usually an Irken only thing. So you were definitely, uh, into it.” Dib hopes very much that if he babbles enough no one will actually have to think about the awful (don’t say sex) they had and he can be right without reliving his worst moments.

Zim doesn’t say anything, but Dib can hear him shifting on the bunk above.

Dib listens to his shuffling until he passes out from exhaustion feeling, strangely, a knot of happiness in the center of his chest.

The morning buzzer, as it turns out, is a horrible hell-siren noise that one expects only from doomsday films involving tornados and avalanches. Dib is, expectedly, waken up into a complete and absolute panic. Therefore, he cannot be blamed for the bodily harm of any persons in his immediate radius, especially when said persons are supposed to be in their own god damn bunk.

“You have maliciously attacked me with your meaty man-hands and it is well within the terms of our temporary truce that I break both of your legs,” Zim says, still on his god damn bunk and adding to the early morning death alarm with his horrible nasally voice.

“Why are you even in my bed, Zim?” Dib slept with his glasses on, and the dig of metal into his forehead was not at all helping with his imminent headache. “You know what? Actually, I don’t care. Please don’t tell me. I want to live alone in whatever world there is where you aren’t trying to harvest my organs while I sleep or something.”

“Perhaps an arm, as well.” Zim gives an experimental poke to Dib’s arm, as if he’s testing the breakability of it. Dib irritably waves him off. The buzzer stops and Dib once more feels at peace with his existence. Maybe living is not so bad after all.

“Fuck off, spaceboy.” Dib sits up and rubs at his abused face. “Let’s go to breakfast.”

Dib is a bit worried about being able to find the canteen again. The ship is pretty vast and, to be honest, all of the glowing white hallways kind of look like the same glowing white hallways. It turns out all one has to do is follow the extremely thick crowd of alien revolutionists all marching in one single unified direction. Dib feels both a little sense of unity, and a little odd.

The canteen is a lot like a lunchroom, which Dib is blessedly used to. Zim complains the entire time about “quality” and “standards,” but Dib’s almost completely sure he’s once seen Zim eat a paper taco wrapper. Dib picks something that looks kind of like it might be a sandwich and hopes for the best. Zim grabs some horrifying green burrito.

And then, instantly, looking out over the tables, Dib is sickly reminded of highschool. Despite the biodiversity on ship, clumps of similar species sat together, laughing and talking at cafeteria tables. All the anxiety of school, having no friends, being the ‘weird’ one twists in his stomach. After all, he’s the ‘weird’ one again, right? He’s the only human on this ship. The only human anyone in his room, or anyone in the galaxy is likely to have seen. No one speaks his language- no one’s every even heard of his language.

Maybe he should just take a page out of his own book and eat in the bathroom.

But, wait, someone at one table is making a motion. Is it waving? Oh, it’s scary plasma gun alien from yesterday. Dib is now incredibly upset at himself for never learning his name. Ignoring Zim’s protests, he threads through the crowd over to Scary Plasma Gun Alien From Yesterday’s table and sit’s right across from him in the attached seat. Dib notices that Zim plops down next to him, looking harassed, and Dib represses a smile.

Zim buries a fork into his green burrito so that it stands straight up like a cell phone tower and turns to look at Dib imperiously.

“I understand you did not mean to leave your rightful slave master behind,” Zim says “But if you are not more careful in crowds you will.”

“Yeah, Zim.” Dib says with an, what he hopes is, obvious eye roll.

“Hello, Human Dib,” says Scary Plasma Gun “I see you are still with your nuisance.”

“Yes, his hair is a nuisance, isn’t it?” Zim looks sadly at his hair, and Dib feels the absurd need to pat it down.

Scary Plasma Gun ignores him. “I am 'EqHegh, or Hegh for your human tongue.” Dib is incredibly grateful for Hegh’s insight. Hegh is kind and good and Zim stinks.

Hegh gestures to the alien next to him. It looks humanoid, but it seems to be made entirely of diamonds. It’s weird, eyeless, shiny pupils unnerve Dib.

“This is Boch. Boch is a very good friend,” Hegh says.

Dib waves weakly at Boch and says hello. Boch stares deeply at Dib and provides no response that he understands. Dib is unnerved.

Hegh introduces them to a couple more friends as the same species as him, names Nehn and Jou, respectively. To Dib’s right sits a Plookesian named ‘Steven.’ Steven seems the friendliest of the bunch (Dib does remember Plookesians as friendly, if not also abandonment-prone), and offers to download English into his translation device immediately.

“So, you’re from like, Earth right? Way cool,” says Steven “I knew a couple buddies that went to Earth. Totally chill if you can get past the whole liquid hydrogen dioxide thing.”

“Earth has liquid hydrogen dioxide?” Hegh nods sagely. “Very cool.”

“It falls as acid from the sky and smells of dead fish breath,” Zim hisses. He has shoved several bitefulls of burrito into his mouth, and large goops of cheese and green shell have flown halfway across the table. Boch seems to eye the mess with disgust.

Steven flashes Dib a confused look. “Humans are carbon-based lifeforms though, right? That should only be a problem for silicone-based lifeforms, like yourself.”

“Yes well,” Zim picks up a glob of cheese with his hand and shoves it into his mouth. “I live there, don’t I, Plook-grub.” 

“But you’re not the dominant lifeform, right?” Steven insists.

Zim opens his mouth, probably to argue that he is absolutely the dominant lifeform because he is, of course, dominant over all humans as their eternal ruler when Hegh interrupts.

“How do you put up with a Irken life-partner? Would squish their tiny, soft head. Make it stop chattering.” Hegh does not break eye contact with Zim, despite Zim shoveling cheese into his mouth in large forkfuls. Offended, Zim allows his jaw to drop, allowing for a sizable glob of cheese to fall back on top of the burrito. Everyone involved remains unfazed, especially Boch.

In the haze of the early morning, Dib comes extremely close to laughing and correcting Hegh. Zim is not his, like, his life partner or something. His top pick for someone he would shove out into the vacuum of space if given the opportunity, maybe. An absolute scourge upon his otherwise normally miserable life, yes.

Then he remembers the marks. And the lifebond. And what Tak said an Irken-Other relation would do for the resistance and how that’s his only ticket to not being sent out the airlock. He sits on his laugh and swallows it.

“It’s” Dib says uncertainly “It’s definitely something.”

Zim, to his credit, manages to ham it up a lot more than Dib could have ever.

“It is more than something! We are so much in love and, ah,” he looked over at Dib for a second before resolutely saying “we hold hands and cry.”

Steven gives them an odd look, but says politely “Well, you both make a cute couple.”

That single comment haunts Dib all the way through breakfast, until they’re both assigned to a meeting in a board room at the other side of the ship. And even a little after that. It will haunt him until his deathbed, he assumes.

—

The board room, in comparison to the rest of the ship, looks the most familiar. It houses a large desk of a similar material to the rest of the ship, decorated with eight or so office chairs around it like baubles on a Christmas tree. A markedly different creature sits at each seat, adding to the whole effect, and Dib finds, with pride, he can name a couple of species already. Sitting right hand to Tak at the lead of the table is a greying Vortian sporting a pair of lime-green goggles. A little to the Vortian’s left, it’s eyes hardly reaching over the table was probably a Narh-Gh’ok (Zim told him a story about them once). The other four species Dib can’t place, but he’s sure he’s seen them around the ship before. The last two chairs sit at the opposite of the table from Tak and the Vortian, presumably for Dib and Zim.

“Hello Tak,” Zim says menacingly, circling the office chair like he was planning on eating it. Dib didn’t doubt he would try for the sheer drama of it all.

“Yes,” she says calmly “Hello.”

“I’ve see you’ve agreed to my terms.” Zim runs one gloved finger along the top of the office chair. It swivels noncommittally.

“They were my terms,” Tak reminds him. “Because you are my prisoner.”

Zim flaps his hand around as if these are minor details.

Dib nervously hovers around near the seat next to the one Zim’s seducing. Is it polite to try to shake hands with everyone before he sits down? What if they don’t have hands. What if they have ten hands. Maybe he should bow? He’s pretty sure he hasn’t seen anyone shake hands _or_ bow. How was he supposed to learn space etiquette when his only go-to was Zim?

“Please, sit down.” Tak motions to Dib’s side of the table, and Dib is eternally grateful. Tak is a true leader of the common-folk, always looking out for each individual citizen.

Delicately clearing her throat, she addresses the room. “Our first meeting with the Umo’ntebha’ shall be introductory and explanatory in nature. Although,” she sides a look at Zim, who either doesn’t notice or care “some introductions may have already been made. Moving counter-clockwise from myself I would like to present my elder partner Lard Nar.”

The old Vortian tips his head respectfully. So it is a bow, then. Dib cranes his neck in response.

Next to Lard Nar is an excitable cone-shaped species that Dib has no intent to try to butcher the pronunciation of, and then a “Plookesian,” which Dib still feels kind of bitter towards despite good relations with Steven. (He’s also disappointed in himself for not recognizing the species). Down the line it goes from there, a bunch of species Dib doesn’t recognize or really catch the names of until Tak arrives at the Nhar-Gh’ok sitting to her left.

“And this,” she finishes “is Sergeant Shnooky, our operations of on-ground military action.” 

“Hey,” Zim interrupts, and, God, they almost fucking made it. Dib wonders if anyone would really mind all that much if he strangled him. He hedges probably not. “I know you. You tried to steal my ship!”

Tak’s face betrays a single second of irritation before she smooths on her diplomatic mask. Dib is impressed, horrified, and jealous.

“We realize some coworkers may have previous experiences they bring to the table.” She gives a very pointed look in Zim’s direction and Dib does not think Zim understands the breadth of Tak’s hatred. “But we ask each individual to leave those behind for the sake of the revolution.”

“Does that mean he’s going to give me a ship?”

“You may have the room on this ship where you are boarded,” Tak says blandly.

“Deal.” Zim slams his tiny fist on the table like a gavel hammer and beams at Dib. Dib resists the urge to bury his face in his hands.

—

Throughout the days leading up to their “official assigned work,” Tak had taken Dib aside to confer with him. With exasperation at his asking about Zim, she said that she trusted Dib to fill him in on the happenings so there was no need for Zim to be physically _present_ for the meetings. (Dib suspects she really really doesn’t want to have to talk to Zim for as long as she can get away with it).

"It became clear to us fast that we could not hope to topple the Irken forces on our own," Tak had said. "The only hope The Resisty has is to unite the Irken people in our favor. But despite efforts, Irken recruitment is still feeble.”

Dib could imagine why.

“We _were_ hard pressed to find a reason for Irken soldiers and citizens to abandon their prestigious jobs and cushy positions just for the sake of, well, you know, justice.”

“Irkens don’t really jive with the idea of justice.” Dib had interrupted. She made am understanding face at him.

“What we needed was a good story. Irken invader, forced to halt his mission because he fell into forbidden love with the native species? Now that is a story. And it's a damn good one."

Tak had said that, at first, they would leak information of their relationship to rebel sources. A couple tips at first: Irken Invader missing from job, last seen with native species. Eventually drop the bomb of love-fueled revolutionaries. But this would only incite Resisty-allied or freed civilizations. What they (what we, she had added, smiling winningly) really need is to spread the story to Irkens, who’re on media blackout. The plan would be to intercept the screens for a couple minutes to air a series of "commercial like shorts" where he and Zim (with a script, of course) would address the Irken population to join The Resisty directly, in the name of love or whatever.

Dib had figured he would, you know, read a couple lines off a monitor all some sort of "seize the means of production" and "people's government" phrases within a foot of Zim and go back to sleep.

Apparently Tak was more attached to her "story" than she originally let on.

"If you could wrap your hand a little further around his waist? We wanna really make sure people can see that."

Zim is already flush against his chest but, sure, he'll pull him a little bit closer. That same alien tells him that it looks great and if he could maybe cheat out a little bit more for the audience? He tries to keep Zim in his place while also turning completely around towards them camera and not letting the headache blooming behind his right eye become a problem. The bright lights all over the room aren’t helping much. Zim grumbles at being pulled closer, and complains loudly of his smell while one of the cameras is still rolling, which doesn't help either. In his arms he feels stiff and uncomfortable, leaning as far as he can from Dib without being yelled at.

"Can we get a quick run through of the script really fast?" asks someone picking at the camera lens. A squat yellow guy with angry eyes and a giant screw sticking out the back of his head. (A species Dib hasn't seen before, actually. Is the screw inserted in some ritual, or are they born with it? Is it surface level? He reminds himself to focus).

There’s a teleprompter-like thing below the center camera, and it scrolls through a pre-written dialogue. (Zim’s lines are in pink, and Dib’s in blue, which he unwillingly thinks is kind of cute). Zim starts off. "It is me, Irken Invader Zim. Of course it’s me, who would not know the mighty ring of Irken Invader Zim? I am reading the lines; I am just fixing them because they smell like dookie. I'm here with my— oh, okay, I am not calling Dib-stench that no matter how many monies you pay me in."

A sigh from the yellow guy who fiddles again with the camera, stopping the script. "No one’s paying you, Zim." He addresses someone behind him. "Maybe we should give his lines to the other one?"

Zim pushes Dib away from him and he lets him go, instead standing with his arms crossed on the green screen, tapping his foot. "Eh? Not paid?"

The screw-head looks at Dib entreatingly. Dib puts his hands up, palms out. He picks his battles with Zim and this one is solidly under the column of “not his problem.” Sometimes Zim can be other people’s problem.

"Let's start from the top, yeah?" he says in response. "Camera’s rolling. We'll discuss your, ah, payment afterwards."

That seems to mollify Zim, and they run through the rest of the script with only one more major blowup (Zim seemed physically unable to call The Tallest ‘inadequate leaders.’ He got into a ten-minute argument over it with the cameraman, and then with Dib before they just let Dib read the line while Zim grimaced disagreeably at the screen).

The screw-head tells them good job, and before we leave we need to get a couple angles of the kiss in.

"The what?" Dib and Zim ask at about the same time, in varying levels of volume (Dib, loudly; Zim, very very loudly).

"Shouldn't be a problem, right? You two together and all."

It's not like Dib is really opposed to kissing. He and Zim have kissed before. Kind of. Except that he totally is opposed to kissing and he hates this. Everyone is looking at him and Zim and the whole room is so bright and hot and they're on camera and a million different aliens all across the universe are gonna watch them suck face. But he can't say anything because everyone else is under the horrible impression they've been exchanging fluids in private which is what their entire defense for not being blown off the ship into deep space in the first place was and oh, God he's gonna have to do it, he’s gonna have to kiss Zim.

He looks uneasily at Zim who seems to be having the same realization dawn across his face and Dib figures it's either now before he can think about it or never. He leans in and kisses him.

It's awful. Arguably, the worst kiss he’s had in his life. Zim’s lips are kind of cold and slimy like two small dead fish and he obviously feels awkward and Dib feels even more awkward. He’s stupidly aware at how chapped and wet his lips are simultaneously. And if Zim was complaining about his smell before, he for sure smells now.

He draws away after a brief, closed mouth peck and he knows the entire crew could tell how bad it was from the disappointed faces all around. They get thanked and dismissed anyways, but, God, they're so toast.

“I think that went well,” Zim says as soon as they’re in the hallway, inspecting his gloved hand.

Dib gives him a look. “We couldn’t have been less obviously attracted to each other if we were actually trying.”

“I was actually trying.” Zim shrugs. “You taste like stink.”

A headache starts to form behind Dib’s right eye, and he pinches the space between his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.

—

The next morning Dib is faced with a dilemma. He still has no idea if Irkens sleep, like, in the normal sense of sleeping. The personality and life of the Irken is stored in the domed metal backpack, so there should be no reason for them to sleep in the conventional way. Dib wonders if the Irken just enters a sleep mode, running on as little power as possible to keep the host body alive while the machine rests. (Up until recently, Don has harbored the idea that this maybe means Zim doesn't have a soul. After all, wouldn't that make him a parasite more than anything? A robotic program hijacking a cadaver to carry out its commands?) But Zims stomach rises and falls in a slow rhythmic pattern, and his face seems more at ease. Very small and thin boned, Zim looks almost vulnerable like this, with one tiny arm crossed over his chest like a child. His other arm rests close to Dib, claw outstretched like he was reaching for him in his sleep. Little puffs of air hit Dibs face as Zim forces it out through his mouth (nix the idea that Irkens breathe through their eye ducts) and Dibs eyes are drawn to his mouth. Zims lips are small, and only a slightly darker shade of green than his skin. Although that makes sense, biologically, it still gives Dib the odd impression that Zims wearing dark green lipstick. The lips look almost out of place on Zims large, flat, reptilian face. A familiar mammalian trait in the mix of otherworldliness. All of Zims features, a lack of nose, ears, nipples, would seem to point towards a lack of lips too, but there they are, and Dib knew from experience that they feel just as soft as normal human lips too. They're parted a little bit, moving gently with the movement of his breaths, and showing a hint of white, wavy teeth peeking behind them like a miniature mountain range. The inside of Zim's mouth is pink and wet with a liquid substance Dib has been unable to identify, but definitely isn’t water based and Zim brings his lower lip into that mouth for a second, wetting it with whatever coats the inside cavern.

Dib wants to kiss Zim.

He wants to kiss him so bad he draws back at first, ashamed. And then doesn't understand why. Zim is his legal soulmate in space or whatever, they're like, interstellar hate married, he should be able to kiss his nemesis husband whenever he wants. It's kissing that got them into this situation anyways, and besides they should get more comfortable with it after their spectacular failure on camera yesterday. But something feels wrong about kissing Zim when he looks so small like this. It's like he's invading some personal area of hard-winned trust that he's only gotten after years of being his only contact.

Finally waking up under his Dibs gaze burning a hole into his face, Zim blinks awake, his domed backpack making a noise that sounds like a computer starting up, some whirring and clicking. He looks blearily up at Dib, grumpy and tired, and aw hell, Dib kisses him.

The kiss lights up a feeling in his chest like a row of tiny firecrackers, the polar opposite of the awkward face smashing in the Television Room that left him embarrassed and red all afternoon. Zim inhales a shaky breath, but tentatively opens his mouth and grabs a handful of sheets on the bed between them. Very slowly, as if scared he'll spook him, he touches the very tip of his tongue between Zims parted lips. He alternates between tracing small circles on Zims bottom lip with his tongue and kissing him soundly until Zims mouth starts to smoke and he pulls away, panting. Dib notices he's been tracing meaningless comforting patterns on Zims arm and stops himself. He pulls his arm back to his side.

Dibs the first one to speak. "We don't want to miss breakfast."

"Eh?" Zim clears his throat. "Yes. Of course."

Flushed and uncomfortable, but determined to stay in charge of the situation, Dib plants him with a quick, parting kiss and rolls out of bed.

Every morning since then has passed the same. Dib wakes up and finds Zim (sleeping?) in his bed, and they kiss. Sometimes they kiss until Zims mouth starts to steam from the water in his saliva and he spends a couple minutes in the crook of Dibs neck panting and coughing, and sometimes he wakes up him with a peck. They never go farther than Dib running his hands along the bottom of Zim's tunic.

The kisses awaken something in Dib that he partly wants to blame on the bond and partly knows that wouldn't be completely true. He spends all night unable to sleep thinking about waking up in the morning. Zim's little moans haunt his dreams and more often than not he starts to wake up to sticky sheets (which he hopes to God Zim doesn't notice or understand). He finds himself wanting to kiss Zim throughout the day, especially when he's said something stupid, which doesn't make much sense.

He kisses Zim, once, at night. They were talking almost amicably, Dib sitting in his bunk and Zim standing. Zim was talking about something Dib was not paying attention to, instead watching Zim's arms flail and point emphatically. Already thinking about the morning, and his heart softening like it does when Zim rants about something that isn't about him, he half starts off the bed and kisses him, mid-sentence. After a brief second of surprise, Zim lets him push him back against the door and give him one of those long, deep kisses that ends in Zim struggling to breathe around his burned mouth. They both go to sleep and do not talk about it, but begin to kiss one another goodnight as well as good morning.

This is why Dib doesn't understand why they can’t kiss on camera.

But it's not just the camera. They can't kiss in front of anyone. Several times people have stopped them in hallways, excitedly asking for a kiss between the human and "the first Irken to kiss someone in, like, forever" only to get sad and disappointed looks when they exchange awkward, stilted pecks on the lips.

After the second disgusting terrible recorded failure, the team decided to approach the situation differently.

"Your relationship is still very new," Tak said. "Maybe what you need is some bonding time, to get over any initial awkwardness."

Which led to him locked back into the Team Headquarters with Zim asking him a stupid questionnaire of stupid questions that wasn't going to make rubbing his face on Zims for the whole universe any less uncomfortable and weird.

"This is dumb," Zim says, echoing Dibs thoughts. He began to make his questionnaire into a paper airplane. "What do they think me incapable of doing a cursory background check on my sworn enemy? And I've known you since you were practically a human larva."

"Yeah, isn't that kinda weird for you?" Dib asks.

"Eh. Irken lifespan is impressively long. It is typical for an Irken to be in maturation long before other species would be, and long after too. The years do not compute well, mathematically."

Dib twirls around in his chair for a moment, and contemplates folding his questionnaire into an airplane too. It's doubtful the team would actually care if they asked the exact questions they were given, as long as they produced results. He doesn't want Zim to think he's copying him though, so he doesn't. 

"How old are you anyways, Zim?" Dib asks, and then curses himself because he thinks that was actually a question given them.

"In human years, I am," Zim waves his hand in front of his face "maybe in the three hundreds. Give or take."

Three hundred years. Zim was well aged before America was even a country yet. Dibs known Zim for a third of his life. What had to have been Zims entire life with Dib was just a tiny weekend off to Zim, while Zim was the focal point of his entire existence. Did Zim conquer other planets before Earth? Did he have other nemesis? Dib is, absurdly, jealous at the thought.

"Before I donated my talents to the military efforts, I had many jobs," Zim continued. "I was a bimolecular chemist who invented the neatest self-stable life form before it became not a self-stable life form and absorbed our Tallest, may her bones grow us taller. Zim served in Impending Doom One and helped with, eh, demolition of outdated technology on my home planet. After this, my Tallests’ realized my power was so mighty I had to be relocated into a sleeper cell agent hiding at a simple fast food restaurant until my raw power had to be harnessed again to turn the tide of the war."

Straight after their kidnapping, Tak had separated him and Zim into different rooms. Personally, she came in and explained to Dib how Zims mission was a fraud, a ploy to get him as far away from the Irken military as possible. (And that not only was Zims mission a lie, the reasoning for the trip to Irk was fabricated as well, Zim knowing full well their relationship was punishable by death). But how did he reconcile that knowledge with Zims story and find the real answer?

"How will they ever survive without you this time?" Dib asks dryly instead. 

"They won't." Zim grins and Dibs heart does an involuntary fond jump that he hates himself for. “We will win.”

Quirking his lips to the side to keep from smiling (because god if he's gonna let Zim see him smiling at him) Dib approaches a different topic with hopes of throwing Zim off balance.

"I think they're really upset about, you know, the kiss."

The smile drops off Zims face and he looks to the side. "I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."

Here we go. "Maybe we should-practice?" Dib says. It comes out more like a question. "Y'know, we could uh. Try to kiss in public a couple times. At breakfast or something." Dib's face is absolutely on fire. Last thing he wants is for Zim to think he wants to do couple things or whatever. 

Which of course Zim immediately calls him out for. "What plan is this?" he asks. "Trying to rub your greasy face grease against me where everyone can see? Huh?" 

Shame crawls hot up Dib's neck which is stupid because it's been Zim whose kissing him in the first place. "You didn't seem to mind my greasy face this morning, lizardboy," he hisses. 

" _Shut up!_ " Zim yells. " _Be quiet_!"

"God, I don't need this." Dib runs his hand through his hair. Gets up.

"Where do you think you're going, you- you _cowardly_ child pig, _augh_ , head?" 

Over his shoulder, Dib throws "I'll see you at dinner" and feels immensely good at closing the door on Zim's scream. Walking quickly, Dib takes the first left. He gets down a different hallway that he doesn't recognize. He doesn't want to go back to his room where, no doubt, Zim will be there angry as hell and ready to try to throw something else in his face. His face heats up again as he remembers their kiss that morning, sidestepping someone in a white doctor's coat to pass them. Okay, it was him who initiated it technically, but what was Zim doing in his bed? Huh? Dib's ashamed at caring and angry that he's ashamed at caring and he wants to punch Zim in the god damn face but he doesn't even have that anymore. Cause he has to pretend to give a shit. Which he _doesn't._

Hovering near a door far to Dib's right is, surprisingly, Steven, the plookesian at their eating table. Too many bad memories of plookesians from his childhood have kept Dib from getting particularly close to Steven, but Dib's happy to see a familiar face regardless. He makes a visual move to get Steven's attention, and Steven smiles brightly at Dib's recognition, cutting off the conversation with whomever he was talking to in the other room, out of Dib's field of vision.

"Hey, man!" Steven says, joining Dib fully in the hallway. "What're you doing up in my neighborhood?"

Dib gives him a tight smile. "Just got some free time on my hands, I guess." An obvious lie, but he's exciting to talk to anyone that isn't Zim.

"Hey, listen." Despite his head being almost a foot shorter than Dib, Steven manages to lean in conspiratorially. "I heard about your weird thing with the video. I wouldn't really worry about it, dude, everyone gets a bit camera shy their first time." He laughs and elbows Dib in the ribs good-naturally. 

"Yeah..." Dib says, a bit embarrassed that that's a rumor now. Are Zim and he a gossip topic? God, he hopes not. "I just wish I could really help out. With the resistance, y'know? This commercial crap with Zim all seems so" _don't say fake_ "scripted."

"Each part in a machine adds to the whole!" Steven's smile almost irritates Dib. Steven's probably doing something cool and badass like building laser guns or chopping aliens' heads off. Actually, wait, Dib has no idea what Steven does. Thinking back on it, he's been so up his own ass about how "important" his and Zim's job seemed before he actually saw what it was, he has no idea what anyone else does around here. Maybe that's the real reason he's not close with Steven. His cheeks flame again. 

"Yeah, I guess you're right." Dib offers him a halfhearted smile. 

Steven cuffs him on the shoulder and says as a goodbye. "Chin up, man! You'll see the payout soon."

Dib isn't so sure. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > I said I wasn't abandoning this fic and gdi im not abandoning this fic LMAO  
> > I have v little excuse of why this took me a year other than that I'm really busy all of the time and would rather sleep than work. I still care about this fic a lot, just not like, more than a nice solid nap. Also writing is really difficult and I stopped talking to my beta for like three months.  
> > easter eggs all the time for people nerdy enough to understand them  
> >even if i don't reply to comments they make me cry each time thanks


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thx to my bffz5ever Mrs. mrsbigfoot.tumblr.com for beta-ing this for me. I bought the rights to invader zim for sixty-eight cents on ebay

Dib fingers the tattoo on his neck. It feels raised on his skin, and smoother somehow. As if hair doesn't grow on that little triangle patch anymore.

"Stop messing with it," Zim snaps without looking up. A long arm reaches out and over Zim from his PAK, holding a little curved laptop in its robot claw. Screens and graphs and letters flash by rapid-fire, which Dib can see reflected in reverse on Zim's eyes. When the light hits them just right, Zim's eyes look like wide mirrors. It's creepy.

"You can't even see me," Dib says, but drops his hand. The mark immediately starts to itch.

"Zim sees all," Zim says ominously. His eyes flash white as the computer screen loads- something.

"How come you don't have a tattoo?" Dib asks. It can sense people talking about it, apparently, because the triangle starts to itch. Lightly, Dib scratches at it. He's too afraid of it still to touch it any rougher. Lately he's even tried to keep his shirt collars away from it if possible.

"What are you talking about?" Zim asks, distractedly waving him off. "Of course I do."

"Oh," Dib says. Goes back to tracing his finger along the raised outline of it. "Can I see?"

Now Zim does look up from the laptop. The top half of his eyes are focused on him, the bottom half the bright blue of the computer screen. Eyelids droop in irritation, making his whole eye seem blue and depthless.

"I will allow you a gracious view at my incredible neck if it'll shut you up."

The high pink collar strains against starched fabric as Zim tries to pull it all the way to his clavicle. But right there, in an exact mirror of Dib's, is a little black triangle.

Seeing it on Zim affects him a lot more than he thought it would. A rush of absurd fondness runs through him. And desire. It's like looking at the thing makes the bond snap in place again, trying to drive them back together to consummate it better than they did at the party.

God that seems like a hundred years ago.

Zim lets go of his collar and it snaps back into place. The fondness goes away, but, uncomfortably, the desire doesn't.

"So, this bond. It is gonna affect how we-" Dib clears his throat. "It is gonna make me not hate you?"

With a sigh, Zim retracts his robot arm back into his PAK. He gives Dib an odd look.

"The only physical aspect is the mark. My translator comes up with 'bond,' although perhaps a closer approximation would be what you humans call 'marriage,'" Zim says.

Dib’s stomach hits his feet.

"Right," he says. So it's all on him to package up those weird horny fond feelings and bury them way, way deep down where no one can find them.

Except in the morning. And at night. But those kisses don't count if Dib doesn't think about them hard enough. Denial is more than just a river in Egypt if Dib makes himself a happy little home in it.

-

The following weeks haven’t brought better results for anyone on the brainwashing commercial front. It’s lunchtime on the fourth week or so of his time here (a lingering Earth anxiety, Dib thinks, that he feels the need to try to track the weeks he’s been gone) and he’s starving because control base has been forcing them to skip breakfasts to catch up on the schedule. Zim had been grumpy all morning from skipping breakfast, which ticks Dib off because he’s almost absolutely sure Zim doesn’t even need to eat.

Irritably, Dib prods his salad with his fork. Delegates a couple wilted looking plants to the upper right of the plate, and scoops grape tomatoes into a little colony, but doesn’t take a bite. Despite how hungry he is. It’s always been difficult for him to eat when he’s upset. Just another way Zim is ruining his day, he guesses. Shouldn’t be surprised at this point.

Earlier in the weeks the studio had given up on the luxury of one continuous shot. Having finished all the other sections to almost-satisfaction, though, they had spent a better part of the morning working on the kiss, of all things. Which, control insists, is incredibly important to get down properly. Dib thinks they’re lying, or that he died in space and he’s in Hell for his early-morning-late-night sins. The disgusting xenophilic ones. Actually, the amount of times he’s awkwardly shoved his face onto Zim’s tense, angry one is starting to turn him off to then too. Dib’s actually pretty sure he never wants to kiss anyone again ever. He just can’t figure out how to relax as soon as the camera comes on. Even when he thinks back to their alone-kisses, he just gets too embarrassed and overwhelmed with the feeling that he’s doing something wrong. Like, morally.

It occurs to him kind of belatedly that he could think of someone else. Some hot _human_ girl, or boy, since that’s apparently what he’s doing lately, that he wouldn’t mind kissing in front of people.

It’s depressing to think that he wants to do that even less, though.  

Dib spears a grape tomato with his fork. Someone’s gonna figure out they’re not actually together, eventually. Alright, yes, the triangle-shaped mark probably means they’re together—somehow. But not like that. Or, he guesses, only sort of like that. Sometimes He blushes at his salad.

“It’s not like that,” Dib tells himself.

“Being crazy again, sad little Dib?” Zim asks, gnawing loudly on an aluminum foil back. The bag is already open. Saliva drips from the corner of his mouth.

Dib buries his head in his hands. God, please don’t let it be like that.

He remembers their “homework,” though. (Which is hilarious. Dib would have graduated high school by now. College letters would already be in the mail, and Dib would be packing for dorm life.) _Try to practice affection in public,_ they said. _If you do it out there, we don’t have to waste film on it in here._

Dib sighs into his hands, and lets one fall next to him, keeping his head resting on the other. Calling upon some deep well of courage and strength, he lets his pinky finger lead his hand in a hesitant scoot across the table until it rests on top of Zim's— hand? Claw?

Of course, Zim conspicuously and instantly stops trying to eat the chip bag. He shoots a look at Dib, which is even more conspicuous and Dib thinks again to himself that there’s no way he could— that there’s no way they’re like that. Zim is too much of an idiot. Squeezing his hand tighter, Dib gives a significant look to their lunch mates as if to say _don’t tip them off, you stupid lizard_. Zim nods sagely, but moves his hand so that Dib is gripping his wrist instead. Dib rolls his eyes. Whatever.

"Hey,” someone says to him “are you listening to me, lovebird, or what?"

"Huh?" Oh jeez, is someone talking to him?

"We were talking about that new eyeball eating squid the armada has-," Steven says, exasperated.

"Allegedly has," Hegh interrupts.

Steven rolls his eyes. "Anyways, then you started mumbling to yourself and stared off into space for a bit."

"Ha Ha," Dib says, uncomfortably. “Sorry.”

Steven smiles knowingly at them. Blinks his eyes a couple times. "You don't have to be embarrassed to hold hands around us, guys,"

Zim's clicks a bright plastic smile on and Dib almost laughs at it. Gums are showing that smile is so wide.  

"We just love to, eh,” Zim says “squeeze our love-tubes into- _augh_ ,"

The smell of burnt flesh rises before Dib sees the smoke. Zim hisses between his teeth, and yanks his hand back, and Dib loses sight of him for a split second in the haze.

When he can see, he sees a thin dark line wrapped around a wrist that Zim cradles to his chest.

" _Curse you!_ Your filthy human sweat has poisoned my soft, advanced skin."

Dib’s ears redden. "If your skin is so advanced, how did I burn it then, huh?"

" _Be quiet!_ " Zim says, and makes a half-aborted little stomp on the ground. “There is no glue aboard this _cursed_ ship.”

Dib’s stomach churns. This is it, he thinks. This is the moment where everyone’s gonna realize that they aren’t—you know—and that they’re stupid space bond is a stupid space-hate bond and he doesn’t like Zim at all—except for the alone-kisses which don’t count— and Zim’s thin, burnt bracelet is just glaring, smoking proof that they couldn’t get away with it.

“It’s adorable,” Hegh says, throwing his arms wide and narrowly avoiding hitting Boch in the face.

“I promise I didn’t—wait, what?”

Hegh laughs. “So nervous about husband in public, you sweat poison from your hand-skin.”

The rest of the table laughs and chatters in agreement. Dib breathes in deep, he didn’t know he was holding his breath, and is finally able to look away from Zim’s wrist. He looks up at Zim and, expecting him to still be pissy, is surprised when Zim looks almost contemplative. His eyes focus on Dib’s and holds them for one beat, then two, and then he purses his lips and shrugs. Lets his hand fall into his lap.

"I guess it could be called 'adorable'." Zim motions one gloved hand with another. "It seems we will just have to get the Earth boy a pair of gloves. Or me some glue."

Is Zim seriously the one recovering them from this? Dib feels still in shock from their close call. He looks at Zim’s face, and then his eyes drop down to Zim’s mouth which is still bunched up to one side. He could do it now, he thinks. With everyone at the table laughing at them and encouraging them and Zim agreeing that he’s—adorable?

Someone at the table tells a joke, because Hegh laughs uproariously and breaks the spell. Dib looks away. The moment between them is gone.

Once the table calms down, though, Dib scoots a little closer to Zim and resolves his unfortunate lingering mushy feelings by hooking his foot around Zim’s ankle. This time, neither of them flinch at the contact and Dib has to hide a smile.

Three notes sound, two up, one down, to signify the end of lunch.

"Oh, Dib," says Steven as Dib unhooks his ankle from around Zim’s. "Can I talk to you, actually?" His gaze sweeps slowly over to Zim and he rephrases, pointing between Dib and himself. "mano a mano?"

Dib gives Zim a sidelong glance, and Zim raises his eyebrows. Or, well, the skin where his eyebrows should be. In a weird eyebrow-like skin formation. How many face muscles must an irken have to move their face like that? (File that for later, Dib.)

Dib shrugs. "Sure."

Zim pulls a face at him, and Dib knows he's going to have to deal with that later. Unfortunate mushy feelings gone.

“What is it you have to say to the salad boy that you cannot say to me?” Zim asks.

“Leave off, Zim,” Dib says, pulling a face back at him. “Why does it matter?”

Zim looks at Dib, and then back at Steven, and then back at Dib again before scoffing dramatically and turning on his heel.

Whatever. Let Zim be a drama queen if he wants. Just because Zim’s been inspiring frequent gross soft feelings doesn’t mean Dib’s going to change his life to revolve around what Zim wants. Stupid Zim. Not that Dib cares. Dib doesn't care about anything Zims doing, obviously.

Steven grabs his shoulder interrupts Dib’s completely-fair fuming.

"Don't worry about it, man," he says. "I've got a surprise for you that's gonna knock off your socks."

Immediately, Dib perks up. "Oh?"

"Can you meet me right here in, like, two hours?" Dib notices that Steven is almost vibrating with excitement. Whatever surprise it is he has planned, Dib one-hundred-percent wants to be a part of it. Especially if it's going to annoy Zim more. Obviously, not that he cares what Zim feels about stuff. It’s just an added bonus.

Dib quickly confirms their plans, and starts off for the bedroom with a light step.

Until he basically bodies a crouching Zim right as he turns around the corner.

"Oh my God, Zim, what is wrong with you?"

“Me?” Zim asks. “What is wrong with me?”

“Yes, what’s-”

“Me?” Zim asks, louder. “What is wrong with me?”

“Yes, that’s what-”

“Me?” Zim asks, flailing now, “What’s wrong with-”

"Oh my God, Zim, _shut up_ ,” Dib says, pushing Zim's shoulders a little. “I think you're just jealous because people actually like me here, unlike _you._ "

"Me?" Zim yells. "Jealous?"

"That's right, I-"

"Me?" Zim yells louder. "Jealous?"

Okay, no actually, he’s done with this.

"Me?" Zim raises his arms in the air dramatically and pounds on hallway wall next to him with his tiny fists. "Jealous?"

People are starting to stop and stare at them openly. Blood rushes to Dib’s face.

"Zim, if you'd just _shut up for a second!"_

"I'll _kill_ you, dirt stench." Zim says suddenly, withdrawing his arms into himself and eyeing him balefully. "I'll have your blood on my hands."

And, really, that's the final straw. How many times do they have to go around in circles like this? Why does it always half to be one step forward and three steps back? The kissing, the talking, the arguments. Any feelings Dib had about Zim vanished. None of it ever matters because they both pretend it's never happening anyways. It's like he's two different people, and Zims two different people, and Dib hates all four of them.

And, God, Dib’s tired of it.

Which is the best explanation for why he’s able to tug Zims chin between the cup of his hand and kiss him so hard his lips feel like they’re gonna bruise.

It doesn't feel good at all, actually. It feels like they’re fighting, but it at least feels like winning the fight. Zim splutters against his mouth and strains hard against his hand but Dib has some unknown hand strength that keeps him in place. Or maybe Zims not struggling all that hard. Another layer of stupidity.

There’s a pregnant pause, and then Dib lets him go. Zim stumbles backwards with the force of wrenching his face away. They stare at each other for a moment. Zim's mouth halfway in a snarl, eyes intent and focused, Dib panting and tired.

And then Zim hightails it.

And Dib turns around and doesn’t watch him go.

-

He’s five minutes early to his meeting with Steven. Honestly, for the last two hours, all Dib’s done is powerwalk angrily down the hallways around the meeting place and avoid talking to anyone, so he’s proud of himself for being only five minutes early.

When he sees Steven around the corner, Dib raises his hand to greet him and is quickly shut down by Steven bringing his finger to his lips in the universal sign for “shut the fuck up.”

Dib lets his hand fall. Okay, so it’s a super-secret mission. Maybe control is assigning him some other work, since Zim is so useless and stupid at everything. That’s probably it.

Steven motions with his hand for Dib to follow, and Dib does, keeping a couple yards behind him at all time just in case. Basic spy knowledge says never let the enemy know you’re involved. Or something.

They walk down to a hallway that only has one door at the very far end of it. Dib has never seen a hallway end, in a door or otherwise, and he tries to fit it into the map of the place he has in his head. (Another Earth anxiety, probably, Dib thinks. The need for things to be contained and finite, even in space.)

At the end of the hallway, Steven soundlessly waves the door open, and long row of mops lines the small room, side by side.

"I knew it! _I knew it,"_ Dib shouts, and then covers his mouth to smother his volume. That doesn’t keep him from continuing to talk through his fingers though. "The mops have been the real secret weapon the whole time. They contain microorganisms on the fabric heads capable of creating temporal _doom._ "

"No," Steven says slowly after a moment. "The mops are for cleaning."

Steven places a hand on Dib’s shoulder, and motions again with the other hand. The far back wall of the mop-closet moves out, spins around, and then tilts upwards like a garage door opening.

"The guns are for temporal doom."

And revealed on the other side is a massive room, walls stocked toe to tip with hundreds upon hundreds of weapons. Huge canon-guns the size of three Dib’s lie closer to the top, and a thousand tiny handguns on the bottom. Like a library, rows of wheeled ladders are scattered every hundred meters or so.

“You were telling me a couple weeks ago how you wish you could be more involved, and I didn’t get you that,” Steven says, hand squeezing Dib’s shoulder “But I did get you clearance to look at this neat weapons to maybe cheer you up. Shooting things always cheers me up.”

“Oh, man!” Dib says, taking off into the room. “Is that one over there a laser gun?”

Upon closer inspection, it is a laser gun. With like, three different dials and triggers despite being the size of the average human handgun. Does it shoot a continues stream of laser, or is it like short bullets? He could never tell with Zim’s guns because he was such a shitty inaccurate shooter anyways.

"Oh, man!" Dib says again, for like, the twentieth time. "Does this one have an auto-coolant re-firing system? I haven't even seen these on paper."

Steven smiles at him. "Yeah, my dude. We have them in the laser hand-canons too."

"Wow!" Dib says. “Can I shoot this one?” Dib points to another gun, further up, about the size of an overweight toddler.

“Uh, sure. As long as you don’t shoot at the other guns, I guess.” Steven shrugs.

Carefully, Dib lifts the much heavier than it originally looked gun off of the wall. It’s the size of a toddler but the weight of ten toddlers. It comes away with a little click, and he drops it on the floor. Dib shoots an alarmed Steven a meek smile and hoists the much, much heavier than he maybe should be lifting gun up on his shoulder. The sharp dig of it into his neck meat where he has to place it is decidedly not comfy. But Dib can barely feel it because he's holding a giant laser gun. How does he shoot it?

“This button?” Dib asks out loud and then presses a button like a trigger near where his hand is naturally resting. It kickbacks immediately, throwing Dib back a couple feet. The gun slides off his shoulder backwards and Dib falls to his knees with it. There’s a loud sucking noise, and a steady beam of light erupts out of the gun for a split second.

The beam, oddly, doesn't throw Dib back again, and he's able to watch as the beam cuts a hole out of the ceiling in a perfect, burning circle.

"Wow!" Dib says again. He relaxes his arm and tilts the gun over to get the weight off his shoulder.

"Like a duck to water." Steven says politely, because it’s absolutely not true.

"What?" Dib turns around, tilting the gun precariously. "Oh. Thanks.”

Steven picks the gun up, and it looks light as anything on Steven' shoulder. Dib's jealous.

"Sure," Steven says, mounting the cannon back in the cannon-shaped-hole where it should be. "You’re really not that bad for a first-timer, especially off a planet without laser-weapon technology. Makes me wish we could actually join the foot-soldiers."

“Hey,” Dib asks, just realizing “How come you’re so much better at talking Human than everyone else?”

Steven grabs a ladder around a rung and begins to walk it further down the aisle. “Don’t you know? Plookesians visit Earth all the time. I could probably even speak it decently without my translator.” He taps on the little Bluetooth-shaped device on his glass dome.

The new hole in the ceiling allows Dib to see a little square foot of space into the room above as they pass under it with the ladder. It looks to be a supply room in similar shape as this one, also fully stocked with weaponry. Isn't everyone else issued a gun, no matter what they do? Dib thinks back to breakfast, and he definitely remembers seeing people with guns to their holsters. People that he’s pretty sure aren’t ground soldiers. It's possible that big weapons like this are only handed out right before battle, or on special missions, but what about smaller guns. Shouldn’t he have one for like, safety?

Dib knows it doesn’t really make sense. He just really wants to have a laser gun.

Dib finds his mouth speaking before his brain can catch up.

"What if we join the foot-soldiers anyways?"

Steven shoots him a puzzled look. "What do you mean?"

But Dib’s voice is running ahead of him. Mouth moving before he really even realizes what he’s saying. "We could sneak in. You could get us disguisers. Those holographic kind. You can get us those, right? We can use those holographic disguisers, and sneak onto a mission. Who wouldn’t overlook two soldiers in a mess of like, what, ten thousand?"

Steven stares at Dib with saucer-round eyes. Again, Dib recalls that he doesn’t actually know what Steven does here. Maybe he’s already a soldier.

"I-I don't know about that, Dib,” he says. “We could die. Worse, we could get ourselves fired.”

Those are sure some priorities.

“We could really do something to help the revolution. Isn’t that what matters most anyways, helping the effort?” Dib asks.  

Steven doesn’t look convinced, but he also hasn’t said no. He hesitates, running his hand over the wood grain of the ladder. He traces his finger over the rung, thinking it over. Dib sees his window disappearing. He’s already committed himself to this plan. There’s no way he can make it happen without Steven’s access to clearance on things like the weapons room, and hopefully disguisers. If he can’t convince Steven to do this for him, he’ll never get another chance at all.

Dib smiles at Steven winningly. “There’s no other friend I’d rather come with me than you,” he says, putting an upwards tilt in tone on the last word to make it seem like a reminder.

Still not looking over at him, Steven fights a smile and Dib does an internal fist pump of success.

“Yeah,” he says softly, and then louder “Yeah, okay. There’s a group heading out in a half-sol. I can get disguisers before then.”

“That’s a lot sooner than I was expecting,” Dib admits “but I’m still totally down.”

In the corner of the weapons room, they spend the next several hours working out the details of their plan.

-

When Dib comes back to their room, Zim is loudly fake snoring. Dib knows its fake, less because he’s still pretty sure Irkens don’t sleep and more because Zim is just actually saying the word “snore” out loud several times a minute.

“C’mon, Zim, I know you’re not sleeping,” Dib says.

“ _Snore_ ,” says Zim.

Dib rolls his eyes and climbs halfway up the ladder to the top bunk. Once he’s high enough to see Zim, he rests his head on the side of it. Zim’s back is to him, but he can see his body twitch with his ‘snoring.’

Dib doesn’t feel like what he did was wrong— after all it was Zim who antagonized him, as per usual— but he does want this fight to end. Picking his battles is the best thing when it comes to Zim, and with the actual battle imminent, this isn’t the one he wants to pick. The volume of Zim’s snores turns up a notch.

Better just tackle it head on. "Sorry about that kiss thing."

Zim shuts up and turns over to meet his eyes. "I'm sure I have no idea what you're talking about."

Dib rolls his eyes. "Sure, yeah, okay.” They sit in silence for a moment, and Dib stares aggressively at a spot on the bedsheets. “I don’t want to kiss you in front of people without like, your permission, I guess."

For a second, Zim squints his eyes at Dib. And then he closes his eyes and turns back over.

"You have indefinite permission, or whatever."

"Oh," Dib says. His face heats up. This was much different than how he pictured this conversation going. "Okay."

Not knowing what else to say, he spends a couple more minutes staring at Zim, watching the slowing rise and fall of his chest now that he’s stopped “snoring” and still wondering if Irkens really sleep?

Zim’s chest rises and he thinks about what he said, and the unfortunate mushy feelings he had, and the maybe-sort-of-like-that. Scrounges up his courage and thinks that he used to have more courage than this when he was a kid.

Dib takes a couple more steps up leans over Zim to kiss him halfway on the mouth. Like, spider-man style. Which is super cool and sexy. A sharp intake betrays Zim's pretend sleep, but Dib ignores it so he can duck his head around the ladder and jump off.

Before he can realize his mistake, he heads straight for the door and Zim “wakes up” and asks him "Where do you think you're going?"

"Uh," Dib says, intelligently. "I have to pee?"

Zim cranes his neck around and narrows his eyes at him and Dib can feel himself starting to sweat under his collar. Why is he always so sweaty? Finally, Zim scoffs.

"Humans are so gross. I take it back, Earth-Beast, I don't want your face anywhere near mine."

Again, Dib rolls his eyes. "Whatever, space lizard," Dib says. And "Don't wait up for me."

The door closing muffles the latter half of Zim's "I won't."

-

They had agreed to meet again in the weapons locker (Steven assured him the foot-soldiers wouldn’t be in this locker tonight, as it was technically the “back-up” locker.)

In Steven’s hand, Dib saw, were two different Bluetooth headpiece shaped objects. They must be the disguisers. Dib reaches out for one, and Steven shows him how to fasten it to his ear. 

“One tap on it to turn it on,” Steven says, demonstrating. It flickers, and then instead of a Plooknesian stood a short vortian, with circular curled horns and an overbite.

“Two taps to turn it back off.” Taps twice, and then Steven is back.

Dib taps the earpiece and, for lack of a mirror, looks at his hands, which are now green and stubby.

“Am I Irken?” Dib asks, twisting his arms out in front of him to get a look at his new skin.

“Yeah,” Steven says, tapping himself back vortian. “I thought it would be funny.”

A weird nauseous wave hits Dib when he goes to scratch his face, sees three fingers and feels five. Nervously, he agrees. Funny.

Both disguised and armed, they leave the locker, but pause at the end of the hallway. They wait, tense, listening. Apparently, Steven hears something because he herds them down the hallway right and end up behind a group of soldiers. An irken and two more species Dib doesn’t recognize.

Dib and Steven quickly fall into step behind them.

"Hey," one of the aliens says, after a couple moments, jerking its hand towards Dib. "Were those guys here with us the whole time?”

"Oh. Yeah," asks another.

Dib starts to panic. "Uh, yes?" he asks

The first alien hums, and scratches his chin. "Well, alright," he says.

 

 

They follow the group into a room massive like Dib's never seen. Can this really still be on the ship? It stretches infinitely in all directions, dotted in a crisscross pattern with even-still large black spaceships. Each ship can probably eat ten of Zim’s ship, easy. For breakfast. One side of each ship has a gaping maw which soldiers pour into like krill into a whale’s mouth. A huge loading dock. Dib and Steven, side by side, follow their group into one of the rushing currents of aliens marching into one ship's mouth. The incline into the ship is steep, but surprisingly grippy for a metal surface. At the lip, though, Steven is pulled in a different direction from Dib to be strapped into the nearest available seating. Dib is ushered to the opposite side of the ship to strap himself in.

"We seem to have more soldiers than we were planning for," says a uniformed vortian standing near him, scratching between his horns with a pen and looking perplexed at a clipboard. Dib throws Steven a sly wink, which Steven doesn’t get because he’s too far away to have heard the comment. Steven winks at him back anyways. Good friend.

For a reason Dib doesn’t know, they wait in the ships for a while. Every second makes Dib feels more anxious that they’re about to be caught before they can even fly off. Aliens around the ship are chatting in a low buzz, though, which reassures Dib that maybe the waiting is normal. No one’s looking his way, so Dib tries to keep his head down.

What looks to be the same vortian from earlier marches stiffy to the lip of the ship’s opening. It’s sans clipboard this time though, and reaches to adjust the collar of its uniform. Dib stifles a laugh at the resemblance to Zim. He’s so for sure gonna tell him about this when he gets back. If Zim ever stops being mad at him for this.

Eh, he’ll get over it. If they’re lucky, no one will even notice. Or they’ll be super famous and everyone will give them awards for how good they shoot.

The vortian clears its throat, and Dib sneaks Steven another look. Now he’s looking back at Dib queasily. Leave it to Steven to try and ruin his plans at the last second. Bad friend. Well, it’s too late, Steven. Still, Dib sends him a thumbs up, and is a little mollified to get Stevens weak return thumbs up.

The ship’s ramp starts to rise silently until it reaches the top of the opening and fastens itself into place with a rather jarring creaking noise. Wind blows past him and his ears pop as the airlock engages. Dib feels a little thrill through him. He did it. Well, they did it. Mostly with Dib’s motivation, without which they never would have even halfway made it. So mostly Dib did it.

The vortian clears its throat again, and the chatter in the room dies down this time.

“Why do we resist?” the vortian asks in the nasally voice typical to the species. It’s little head bobs as it surveys the room, but his voice sound strong and sure. “For those in the Resisty, we do not resist for power, or for monies. We do not resist, in the Resisty, for personal gain.”

That’s right, Dib thinks. We exist to kick entire alien butt. And get cool space medals like the scene in Star Wars. Steven is definitely Han though. Except Dib’s not gonna lose a hand.

It pauses, eyes resting in the middle of the room. “Does anyone know why we resist?”

The room is silent. Dib assumes this is a rhetorical question, of which the answer to is kicking entire alien butt and all that other stuff.

“We resist for love.”

Oh, wait. Oh, God, no. Please don’t let this be about what he thinks this is about. Underneath the hologram, Dib’s cheeks redden.

“As long as love can be found in the most selfish of races, and the most savage of planets, then we will resist,” the vortian continues. Its gaze seems to drift to Dib like a honing missile. Dib stares resolutely at the floor.

This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. When Tak said she was basing the recruitment theme around their “relationship,” or unfortunate lack therof, Dib hadn’t pictured it all weird and gross and stuff. Sure there’s selling love as an angle, but this is just stupid. All these aliens on this ship, and millions more, have seen him rubbery-mouth kiss Zim, and they just _die_ over it?

Blushing furiously, Dib ignores a now-grinning Steven and stares hard at a chip in the floor tile. Stupid Steven. Just two seconds ago he was gonna barf it all over the floor ‘cause he’s scared of death or whatever and now everything’s comedy hour at the chuckle hut. Dib tries very very hard to block out the rest of the vortian’s speech. Very unfortunately, he hears his and Zim’s name several times. Sometimes even right next to each other. When the room erupts into cheers, Dib tunes back in and is relieved to find that the speech is over. Chancing a look at Steven, Dib finds he’s still grinning at him. Dib pretends he can’t see him.  

Almost right after the speech ends there’s a sickening lurch which sends Dib's stomach into his ears. The ship quickly gets its balance, though and glides smoothly off. Windows line the walls like teeth, and through them Dib watches spacetime smooth out to a faded grey as they reach max velocity. Just like in Star Wars. Neat. There’s a gentle buzzing from the turbine Dib’s closest to, but otherwise the ship is silent. Friends and coworkers that were talking earlier are quiet, as if the vacuum of space sucked up the noise. As if the heaviness of the air dampened everyone’s high spirits. In the silence, oxygen masks are handed out to creatures who need them. Keeping his face down, Dib snatches one and pulls it over his face.

For a second, Dib feels a genuine lick of fear in the raw pit of his stomach. It kinda feels like his heart and his lungs and his spleen got put into a blender and dumped back into him. And also like he’s about to go to war and die.  

He thinks of Zim, back in their room, chest rising slowly and then falling like a tick-tick-tick, pretending to be asleep. Or maybe actually sleeping. He still doesn’t know. Waiting for him to come back from the bathroom when he won't. And he feels- weird. Guilty? Why should he feel guilty? For saving the entire universe? And kicking massive alien butt?

He remembers flying through a different spaceship with Zim. Pointing at planets and stars and eating shitty granola bars on the floor. Looking at all of space fly by in a dull grey with a thousand different species feels lonelier, somehow.

Another lurch forward as they stop, and Dib's spleen presses uncomfortably into the seatbelt. He doesn't wanna be that guy who vomits on the ship before the mission. Plus he's sure the guy who vomits is probably likely to be asked for I.D., and Dib doesn't think they'll get lucky twice if pressed.

After a couple seconds, the seatbelt gives way, like a themepark ride, and Dib stumbles forward a bit getting out of his seat. The wide door opens, and, unhitching his blaster from his belt, Dib jogs out with the crowd.

At first Dib doesn't really understand where they are. It looks like a really old shopping mall. But like, huge. When Dib looks up, it resembles more a city bank in amount of floors than a mall. But the walls are decorated with little storefronts, giving off the general appearance of a termite hive. Along the general walkway are scattered waiting benches and fake plants. Dib notices stupidly that the plants don't have any dust on them, despite the mall looking abandoned for at least decades.

The group moves forward in a unit that Dib tries to stay at the back of. If he stays at the back, they might not notice an extra person moving not quite along like the rest of them. The whole place is still. Even the leaves on the plastic bushes don't seem to be swaying. Their steps sound so loud to Dib. Like little bombshells erupting in a uniform march. A glowing bit of neon sign pokes around the corner indicating the food court. Huh. Who would have turned the neon on? Who's paying the bill for that electricity for the-

And then- Noise. A thousand life-size explosions in his ear. The lights are bright, bright, bright all of a sudden and he hears a gentle whine, like a mosquito. Pressure is on his eardrum. The mosquito is trying to bury itself in his ear and it hurts so badly. There's an ambush happening from above. An ambush they didn't anticipate. He hears someone shouting in his ear to move from underwater but he can't figure out where and in which direction. He tries to follow someone, hide where they hide, but they get lost in the crowd almost instantly underfoot. Everyone is scrambling. He steps on something soft that crunches.

Dib mind clears for just long enough to understand that someone is shooting at him. The thrill of death tickles him and makes him duck low below everyone. He runs as fast as he can in one direction, hoping not to get stepped on, hoping he wouldn't get caught by a stray bullet. Someone ahead of Dib falls and kicks him in the face on the upswing, smashing his glasses and digging the frame into his cheekbone. It doesn't hurt, but Dib feels that his cheek is wet with- probably blood. His face feels prickly and numb.

Getting finally to a place where the crowd is thinner, Dib takes a run for it and hauls ass to a bench that he ducks behind.

Sitting down, Dib realizes that his mask is fogging up over his eyes with moist breath in a slowly inching-out circle, and now he can't see out of the eye that has a glasses lens left. He knows he needs to control his breath, stop hyperventilating, but now he can't see and the noise sounds closer, like it's coming for him. If he could only stop hyperventilating.

He hears something that sounds like words out of the rising wall of screams and gunshots.

"Hey," it says. "Dib, hey!"

Dib uses his cheek to wipe away some of the condensation on his mask, too scared to move his arms. Blood follows it, but it cleans off enough of a portion so he can see. He sees, twenty yards or so away, behind another bench, Steven. Oh, thank God. Somebody, anybody is alive. And here with him.

Dib motions with his hand that Steven should come over here to him. There's safety in numbers, right? If Steven will just come over here, everything will be alright. Maybe he and Steven can stand back to back so Dib can block out this horrible growing feeling that's been crawling up his spine that someone is right there, right there behind him. Steven doesn't answer him. Dib motions harder, waving over to himself as frantically as he can. His mask isn’t gonna be clear for long. A gunshot flies down a few feet behind Dib, who feels the sharp whine in his molars more than hears it. It generates a loud explosion that sends concrete up in huge screaming chunks and rams Dib's knee into his mouth. Dribbling out blood, Dib looks up to see Steven frantically shaking his head at him. Can't he see that if he'd just get over there that everything would be alright? Dib swallows. There feels like there's so much vomit in his stomach his organs are liquefying and melting in it. Into some sort of gross organ soup. A sharp pain hits Dib in the gut, like a stitch. Or maybe even an organ broth.

Steven shoots him a conflicted look, but, crouching onto the balls of his feet, makes a mad dash for Dib's bench. He passes a pile of upturned stone and then a body, propped up against the stone walls by the force of the bullets before Dib sees a little red mark following behind him, like a baby duckling. Fear is choking him and when he screams nothing comes out. The bullet makes a visible screaming line through the top of Steven's tank to the bottom. Cracks spiderweb through the holes in his tank, almost in slow motion, and the force of the liquid pressing on the glass cracks it into a thousand pieces. Shattered glass barely skitters across Dib's feet. Steven ragdolls to the floor, his body suddenly dried up and noodle-like. Almost comically, he deflates, leaving a pastelike substance in a Steven-shape. Dib vomits up a thimble-full of stomach bile and then finds he has no more in his stomach and retches dryly. 

A force knocks him to the ground and something else cracks- not his glasses this time- and pain blossoms on the side of his head so painful he retches again. Reaches up to feel it, out of habit, and comes away not only with blood but grasping a half a little bluetooth shaped plastic chip. The Disguiser. The green skin on his hand flickers once, and then fades to normal. God, oh fuck, no. He can't die here. He's gotta hide. Gotta find a way to hide his face, but his face just hurts so god damn bad. He heaves himself forward with one arm, not really knowing where he's going, but knowing he needs to move. Sleepy, really sleepy, but you're not supposed to sleep if you have a concussion? Right?

Someone's saying his name but it sounds from far away, like someone's shouting at him through a tunnel. The world kind of feels like it looks through a tunnel too, you know?

His last thought is on a little chest rising very slowly and falling with a tick-tick-tick.

-

And he’s back at it again in a tiny concrete box. Honestly, he thought he’d improved at least a little bit.

The box begins emanating a tinny voice. The intercom system, Dib realizes.

“Hello, prisoner! It seems that you’ve woken up.” A pause. “ _Good_ for you.” The voice is incredibly nasally, even through the shitty speakers. And also incredibly familiar.

A different voice speaks, deeper and equally familiar. “You’ve been imprisoned on the bestest ship to ever get all conquer-y up in here: The Massive!” This voice is somehow, even worse.

“Really? ‘Get all conquer-y?’” Dib asks.

Dib rolls over onto his side and grips his head. It feels like it’s splitting into three even pieces. All of his muscles ache because he’s been sent to space hell to be tortured by the recorded voices of Statler and Waldorf after a rhinoplasty for all of eternity.

“Congratulations for rotting on the best ship ever made!”

A ding finalizes the message and Dib is so, so grateful.

The Massive. Doesn’t he know that name? But, ugh, his face feels like someone’s pushing a needle through his left eye. Isn’t The Massive that big Empire ship? Dib feels a pang through his gut that has nothing to do with his injuries. A real soldier would know this.

A real soldier wouldn’t have got caught in the first place.

A real soldier wouldn’t have gotten his friend killed.

Dib bites his lip hard and forces himself to focus on where he’s heard of ‘The Massive.’ You can’t change the past.

The walls ding again to indicate a message and Dib calculates how long it would take to kill himself by smashing his head into the side wall.

This voice is different. “You’ve been chosen by the almighty Tallest as a special interest prisoner. Confetti,” it says.

“Did you just,” Dib forces out through ground teeth “Say the word confetti out loud.”

“The all-knowing Tallest have left you a prerecorded message.”

Lovely.

“Sorry we can’t meet you in person, Dib.” The nasally voice is back and no, oh no, that’s where he’s heard it before. Through brief interactions when Zim had called them. And hadn’t they video-chatted once, when he was like, twelve?

The Tallest snickers. Dib remembers that too, that they— snicker a lot.

“Yeah!” The other Tallest says “We don’t want to catch any of your _ugly Earth diseases_.” 

The first one again. “Good one. Ugly diseases, can you imagine?”

They both laugh.

“Since you and your _defective_ are so fond of television broadcasts, we’ve decided to send him a little broadcast of our own.”

“Tell him what it is. Oh, no, let me tell him what it is,” one of them pleads.

“We’re going to air your execution live to the entire universe!” The voice says this so loudly the speakers go out for a moment.

“Oh, Red, you’re no fun,” interrupts the other one.

The one who’s apparently ‘Red’ says “Well, maybe if you hadn’t messed up the first recording-”

The audio ends with a chime.

For the first time, Dib thinks to himself that this time he’s really done one doodle that can’t be un-did.

Even though he spends the night unable to sleep for the rotten pit of guilt and fear in the bottom of his organs, the night is the quickest night he'd ever spent. Just as he had started to steel himself for the possibility that he would die here, two irkens, bigger and beefier than he's seen two irkens, corral him out of his cage and into another room with long tridents. The spears zap with electricity, and Dib tries to stay far ahead of them. They giggle amongst themselves, a poke to Dib in the back with sharp jabs whenever the laughter dies out, and then they explode into giggles again. Just like the stupid Tallest.

It takes several moments of giggling and cackling before Dib realizes that they're not speaking in English at all. Or, laughing in English rather. In fact, they aren’t laughing at all. Dib sees that neither of them are wearing translators. This is what the Irken language must sound like raw. Like— giggling. Is it because Irkens have no reason for translators? Why would a genocidal species need to be able to understand anyone else? Or is it just to spite him? Try to psyche him out to feel lonelier, more confused?

Dib grunts at a sharp poking pain in his back and the laughter reaches a fever pitch. A headache starts to bloom behind Dib's right eye, and he actually smiles wryly, remembering all the times Zim caused that same headache.

The thought causes his stomach to sink. He remembers the last time they talked. You have indefinite permission. A rising feeling in his throat, like he might vomit.

A third irken enters the room. Tall, and green eyed, only a few shades darker than his skin. He looks like he was molded out of one piece of clay, two shiny moving lumps of skin to designate sight. It puts Dib's stomach into his lungs, somewhere below the vomit and the stomach bile eating away at him. For whatever reason, he feels like he’s looking at a walking irken corpse when he sees the green-eyed one. The cadaver grabs his arm, giggling at him, and injects him with a syringe drawn out of his jacket. It spreads a numbness up Dibs's arm, and up into his chest and Dib thinks for a terrible moment oh, god, they just euthanized me. This is it. Pain follows the numbness. Worse than when he got that tetanus shot in the tenth grade because Zim nicked him with a rusty blade. The pain holds his chest, like a python squeezing, and then gently burns away.

The irkens face each other and laugh, full bellied. By all three of them, Dib is ushered through a maze of more rooms. This place seems almost the opposite of the endless hallways of the Resisty. Like a honeycomb of tiny rooms nestled right against each other.

He's led into a room that looks different from the others in that it seems to be carved out of one continuous block of stone. The wall is smoothed up top like a cave and— oh, okay, Dib thinks as he sees a barred drawbridge at the end of it, it is a cave.

There is a low hum in the background that seems echo-y through the cave. One of the irkens chuckles darkly and stabs him hard in the back, sending his sprawling forward onto the rock. His muscles twitch painfully, contracting from the electricity. Looking up behind him, Dib sees the door has been closed and he’s left alone.

With nowhere else to go, Dib drags himself to the barred drawbridge. Through the bars, Dib sees what seems to be a huge Roman Colosseum. Except, not Roman at all, because it turns out the low hum was millions upon millions of little green irkens screaming. Large television screens, must be miles wide, float among the crowd showing close-up clips of irkens screaming, eating, or laughing. Above him is a bright orange sky, casting a dirty glow on the world. Like a night-mare realm.

Straight across from him was a barred drawbridge identical to his, a thousand times bigger in size. As soon as he notices it, his drawbridge begins to retract and Dib understands. They weren’t going to kill him outright. They’re going to make a show out of him first, watching him run for his life. Steadying himself on the wall, Dib stands himself up and limps into the Colosseum.

Well, fuck then. It’s time to give them a show.  

Something charges out of the other drawbridge to the screams of the crowd.

The first thing that Dib notices about the monster is that it’s pink. Like really, really pink. Why is everything irkens own always pink? It’s also low to the ground and on all fours, so Dib’s mind immediately goes to dog. Dogs are good at running, and also hunting. What are dogs bad at? Nothing. Dib’s going to die. A large snout sniffs the air. Nuzzled at the base of the nose are two indented slits. Those are probably its eyes? It’s blind, then, Dib realizes. Patches of fur cling to its skin, but otherwise it seems to just be one giant flesh monster with no eyes.

Dib feels a moment of hope. If it's blind, maybe he has a chance to outwit it. But why would they give him a monster he could outwit? What’s the point of trying to kill him if they’re going to give him a way out? If Zim can figure out where he's gone—or if he cares—he may only have to outwit it for a bit before he figures out the Tallests’ games.

Apparently having found a smell that it liked, the creature rears back on its hind legs, showing a rope-scarred belly. The sound that comes out of its mouth sounds like nails on a chalkboard, and leaves Dib’s ears ringing. The noise of the crowd dulls. Dib notices a flash of something white in the dead center of its mouth that he doesn’t think are teeth. Too far in the center, almost at the back of its throat. Most of its teeth seem to be overhanging its lip like an overbite-underbite sort of deal. It opens its mouth again to scream, and there, at the very back of its throat, are two wildly spinning volley-ball sized eyeballs.

Ah. Eye-eating squid monster. At least part of the rumor was correct. There are eyes inside of its mouth.  

One huge volleyball stops, pupil arrested on Dib. A beat, and then the other eye stops on Dib, and the monster is looking right at him. It’s then that Dib decides to vomit, and the monster’s cry is overwhelmed by the audience’s disgusted reaction. Now it smells awful, like the inside of his stupid rotten stomach, and he vomits again. Non-audience noise erupts from the far side of the stadium, and Dib doesn’t even bother to look up. He just runs. The shoes they put him in are wet with his vomit, and he almost slips before catching himself. He stays along the far edge of the colosseum to try to put as much distance as he can between him the monster. It's turn speed is slow, Dib notices, like an alligator. Whenever he changes direction, he gains precious meters on it, but there's no way he can outrun it when it has him dead on.

As quickly as the creature got itself reorientated, Dib switches himself in another direction, alluding it along the curve of the wall in a zig zag motion. A stitch starts to form in Dibs side. Weeks of life in zero g have seriously impacted his muscle density, as well as just being out of shape. There are serious downsides to a life where he isn’t physically fighting Zim anymore. Dib can't do this avoiding game for long, and he suspects The Talllest will put something to his disadvantage soon if they get bored.

Dib turns another corner, and his feet get caught up under him. This time he stumbles, and the mistake costs him most of his lead. The ground starts to pitch and shake under him the closer the monster gets, and now Dib’s worried he’s going to fall again, this time directly underneath the monster’s huge foot. Clenching his eyes shut, Dib falls flat forward instead, hoping to roll himself under the worst of the creature’s attack.

The right foot narrowly misses Dibs stomach, as far as Dib can tell from the noise, but does graze his shoulder. Something snaps- so loudly he thinks it’s in his skull until pain paralyzes him from shoulder to elbow. His clavicle must have broken. That’s the only way to explain how much pain he’s in. There’s someone screaming really loudly right next to him, but Dib can’t see who it is because everything looks so dark suddenly. He thinks that he should scream because he heard it helps fight pain. He’s already screaming, though. He’s been screaming.  

Something else is screaming too. The monster. Dib has to move or do something right now because in seconds he’s going to be dead. Fear jolts into his muscle like an electric shock, and he flings himself up and goes sprinting in a direction. A direction he hopes the monster isn’t in. The ground shakes again, but the creature’s scream doesn't accompany it. Is he still screaming? Dib keeps running, his breath burns his throat as he swallows air hard. Each gulp feels like a pound of sand. Another shake, and a blue light, like real lightening and he’s thrown to the ground like it’s moved sideways to meet him. On his back, Dib sees the heavens crack open like an egg, revealing space to him as its split yoke.

People were on the field now. We're people supposed to be on the field? He wonders if it’s because he’s dead now, and he gets to see the last seconds before they scrape his body off the concrete. The pain had spread in a slow burn up most the base of his head, and he can feel his pulse there. It’s like his whole skin pulses with it. And with every beat of it comes with a strong throb of pain. Did he already say that? Loud sounds. The sound of guns going off. Everything is much darker than before. It this hell? Dib glances behind him and sees a group of identical blue clothed toys on strings shooting at pink, entrapping it in a cage of blue light.

Someone grabs him. Another blue clothed alien. It takes off its head- a helmet, and green is below it. Green like Zim. Strong arms around his waist, and he’s hauled upwards. A part of his chest feels like it crunches, and he screams again. 

His heart physically hurts, like it pulled itself up through the layers of bone and flesh to deliver its pulse right into the first layer of skin.

But the ground beneath him is suddenly cool, and the crunch in his chest lessens when he's let go. The noise here is quieter, which is nice. He stops screaming. A voice he recognizes-Zim. Why would Zim be in hell with him? Did Zim die too? Zim comes near and grabs his shirt. It peels away from his skin which feels so good and so cool. And while Zim's vice like grip on his chest hurts like a motherfucker, it also feels like a lifeline pumping directly into his veins. But the bond doesn’t have any physical affect? That’s right, he likes Zim. Zim is hissing something at him (hissing, not giggling) and Dib spends his energy to crack his eyes open and see Zim's bleary green head.

Dib's head lolls to the side, because it’s so heavy.

"I missed you," he says inanely.

The hissing stops and Zim huffs at him. A little puff of breath on his face. Feels two hands cradle his head, and then none-too-gently pull forward.

"If you," Zim says, slowly and carefully, and Dib can see him now that he's up close. Dib thinks he might be crying, because his face is wet. Embarrassing. He hopes it’s blood. "ever scare me like that again, I will make your skin into beef jerky and I will eat it. And it will taste good. _So good."_

And before Dib can say anything, Zim is kissing him. Which is great because it means he’s definitely not dead. And because his mouth is soft and warm and very nice. Zim’s hand is clutching desperately at him, but his mouth is paper-light, like he’s afraid Dib’s about to fall apart. Which he probably is. Regardless, Dib lifts a hand to Zim's face, tilts him to the side and presses closer. He kisses him again, and again, and again until he hears someone say "please tell me you're getting this on camera."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> > THIS CAME SO MUCH EARLIER THAN I THOUGHT IT WOULD????  
> > On that note the next chapter should be the Actual Real Life last chapter. We've only got a little bit left to go!!  
> > I made a ton and ton of references in this chapter as per usual lmao. bonus points for anyone who can find them can be redeemed at the gift shop.  
> > Honestly TBH the next chapter might be a bit coming. this is the part of the fic i have planned out the least OTL  
> > pls come talk to me on iheartdirt.tumblr.com i promise it won't take me as long to reply as it takes me to update ;_;;


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